


You Can Guard My Life Anytime, Soldier

by betheflame



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Artist Steve Rogers, BAMF Pepper Potts, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Dorks in Love, Dumbasses in Love is Just My Favorite, Fluff and Angst, Idiots in Love, Lifeguard Steve, M/M, Steve Rogers Is a Good Bro, Tony Stark Has A Heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-05-31 10:05:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 32,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19423756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betheflame/pseuds/betheflame
Summary: Steve Rogers is the newest lifeguard at Tony Stark's Barnegat Beach Resort and Tony has some questions.First, how is it legal for one human to be that hot?Two, where does Steve disappear to on his days off - or, more specifically, who?Finally, does that blush mean Steve likes Tony's flirting or is about to sue Tony for sexual harassment?+++++++++A story where Tony has his shit together and Steve *thinks* he does, but then he doesn't, and Tony helps put him back together again.





	1. Chapter 1

“Fuck,” Tony breathed, “it is hot.”

“Which is why I, once again, ask why we are sitting out here and not in one of the shaded cabanas with the fans,” Pepper said lazily as she flipped her magazine page. 

“I like the ambiance,” Tony protested. 

“You can’t spell ambiance, and you like the new lifeguard,” Pepper replied calmly. 

“A-m-beyawnce,” Tony retorted, “and I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She put down the magazine and peered over her sunglasses at him. “Anthony. I am your roommate and that soundproofing is not as good as you think it is. Do you want me to elucidate further or shall we both just agree to call a spade a spade here?”

He glared at her. 

“He’s super dreamy,” she smiled. “Like, 1950s Beach Blanket Bingo dreamy, so if we’re over here to perv on the new guy, I’m not upset, I’d just like to do it openly and not playing one of your elaborate mind games.”

“Steven Grant Rogers, likes to be called Steve,” Tony murmured. “I checked the employment records.”

“Of course you did,” Pepper said. “I thought you promised Darcy you wouldn’t do that any more.”

“I own the place, Virginia, I get to do what I want.”

“Again, I repeat, I thought that after that whole thing with the Norwegian guy last year that you wouldn’t dig through employment records to get phone numbers.”

“I just needed his name, Pep. Screaming ‘blonde lifeguard with the body of a fucking marble statue’ wasn’t really tripping off the tongue.”

Pepper snorted. “Well, I’m going to get an iced tea and I may have them put vodka in it. You want anything?”

Tony shook his head. “I’m speaking at the employee barbeque tonight.”

“Did Natasha threaten your balls again if you showed up drunk?”

“She scares me, Pep.”

“Good,” Pepper replied with a smile. “Someone should.”

As Pepper walked off towards the clubhouse, Tony let his gaze fix once again on the guard in chair 4. 

Tony had won the Barnegat Beach Resort five years ago in a bet and it was turning out to be one of his favorite accidental investments since taking over his dad’s hedge fund at 17. Ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, the resort had needed a lot of love that Tony had shocked himself he was happy to give. It gave him a lot of excuses to use his long-dormant love of fixing engines and tinkering with machines and inventing faster ways to make stuff run.

 _Steven Grant Rogers of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn_ , Tony thought to himself as he observed the man. The guy was retired Army, currently putting himself through art school with some G.I. Bill money and working here for the summer to supplement. Nat told him that he was living with some other summer staff in the dorms Tony had built the season before and was known around the staff as just a really fucking good guy.

He was a designated driver when the staff went out and did freelance graphic design in his spare time. He read like a fiend, supposedly his first request had been for directions to an Ocean County Library branch, and followed baseball like it was a religion. A Mets fan in Phillies territory was a brave act in and of itself, but one Steve seemed to handle with charm. Any time off he had, he spent traveling to Philadelphia to visit someone everyone assumed was family because Steve never talked about it, but also never swapped shifts with anyone. 

He was 24-years-old, which was just at the lower limit of Tony’s personal boundary of having five years on either side of his current age as permissible fantasy subjects, and Tony also had a personal policy of not assuming anyone else’s sexuality so for the time being, Steve was staying firmly in the spank bank inventory. 

_But oh, what an inventory I’m building_ , Tony smiled to himself as he watched Steve jump down from the chair to help guide a little girl to the first aid station. 

“Perv,” a low voice said next to Tony and he grinned. 

“Scary Spice! How delightful to see you and I see that Pep’s been telling tales out of school again.”

“Please,” Nat rolled her eyes and sat down in Pep’s vacated lounge chair. “If someone on this planet who is attracted to dudes isn’t into Rogers, I will eat my paycheck. Anyway, we need more ice for the coolers for tonight and we are super shorthanded. Can you run to Wawa for me?”

“Can I do literally anything else?”

She rolled her eyes. “Your irrational hatred of convenience stores mystifies me, but if you want to tinker around with the freezer that just blew a coolant coil, be my guest.”

“It’s so many people in such a small space and they all want processed meats,” Tony said shuddering. “A coil is child’s play, I’ll do that.” When she smiled, he chuckled. “Which was your plan all along.”

“Thanks, boss man. Your tools are in my office.” She patted him on the shoulder and left him digging for his flip flops. With one last glance at his favorite eye candy, Tony headed off to the main building of the club.

____________________

_Buck: No fuck, hot dude is your boss?_

Steve sighed and kept one eye on everyone around him, making sure that no one could read his phone over his shoulder. 

_Steve: He owns the place. My boss is Darcy, her boss is Natasha, and Tony Stark signs our paychecks._

_Bucky: Tony Stark, like the hedge fund guy?_

_Steve: Evidently yeah, but I’m not the only one who didn’t know, so there are a lot of folks fawning over him here. It’s weird._

_Bucky: It’s weird you’ve been wanking off to the fourth richest guy in America and didn’t know it? #TypicalRogers_

_Steve: I swear to God, you and Peggy being friends is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me._

_Bucky: Peep Show, man. Greatest show._

Steve rolled his eyes and put his phone back in his pocket, but it buzzed one more time. 

_Bucky: Sneak some photos to bring on Monday. Give the crip some art, man._

Steve knew if he – once again – reminded Bucky that he wasn’t a cripple that would lead to either more yelling or aggressive GIFing, so he put the phone back in his pocket and headed over to get another beer from the cooler. 

“Hey, everyone,” Nat called as she clinked a glass to get all of their attention. “Mr. Stark wants to say a few words before we all head home.”

“For fucks sake, I did not, fine, hello,” Tony muttered the first few words, but Steve was close enough to hear him and had to hide a smile. “To those of you who are spending your first summer with us, welcome! We like to say around here that we take the job seriously but not ourselves, and I hope you find that to be the case. 

“I’m Tony and I’m around sometimes, but your real boss is Nat, so make sure to pay attention to her. We have some big celebrations this year, both for members and for the community, so there’s a lot of opportunities to pick up some extra shifts and we’re always looking for more good folks to join the team.

“I know it’s only one week after Memorial Day, but it’s fucking roasting here and all the science says this summer is going to be one of the hottest on record, so please also hydrate and take care of yourselves, etcetera. I pay for a doctor to be here all summer for you guys, so I don’t want to hear any bullshit about not having insurance. This summer, you do, and if I find out you’re being stupid, I’ll have Nat kill you which I think she can do with her thumb.”

“Confirmed,” Nat called from the side of the makeshift stage to a round of laughter. 

“So, our next big event is the Pride fest weekend, and then the 4th of July, and we always do a Christmas in July thing for the local kids and there’s a big book drive with the library for that, and then August is when all the New Yorkers come and if you think New Jersey and Pennsylvania folks are pushy, just wait for August and I say that as someone who is a born and bred New Yorker myself, so I know of what I speak. Make sure that we have your end dates for anyone going back to school, and what else….”

Tony snapped his fingers. “Oh yeah, have a great time, okay? And if there’s anything we can do to make a guest have a better time than they’re having, we want to do it. Some of you may not know our model, so let me break it down for you. 

“To be a member here is pretty cheap, actually, and the fees are determined on a sliding scale of income. The thing is that you have to be here a certain number of weeks during the season so that it can kind of feel like a family environment. That’s how we get a lot of guests helping with the parties – some of them are more invested in place than I am, and I like it that way.

“There are only three areas of the club that are members only – the showers, the pool, and the east beach bit with the grills. Everything else is also open to the public, which means our parties as well. No one who isn’t staff can be in the dorms and that’s for insurance because I really don’t care who you do in your spare time, I just really hate insurance premiums. 

“My main thing is for you guys not to be dicks to each other or the guests and all the normal employment rules apply. If you have any questions, ask Nat or Darcy because they know more than I do anyway. Have a great summer, guys, and if I don’t see you before, I’ll be back for the Pride party as always.”

Tony waved and headed over to were Nat and a red-headed woman were standing to a smattering of applause. 

“Why did he say ‘as always?” Someone to Steve’s left asked and the guy standing with them snorted. 

“Tony Stark is the pansexual poster child of his generation. Pride is his Christmas.”

 _Well, we’re going to tuck that away_ , Steve thought to himself as he fought the blush he knew was creeping up the back of his neck. Instead of dwelling on that, he pulled back out his phone. 

_Steve: When are you cleared for work?_

_Bucky: Sam says three more weeks. Why?_

_Steve: Stark just said they’re always looking for people. Want me to see if maintenance has an opening?_

_Bucky: Sure, why the fuck not. It’ll be interesting to see what I can do with one hand._

_Steve: You have two hands, Buck._

_Bucky: I have one hand and a hook thing. Let’s not be crazy here._

_Steve: You gotta think positive, jerk._

_Bucky: Yeah, yeah. Go hit on your boss._

_Steve: No._

_Bucky: Actually, don’t. You are terrible at this. Wait until your best wingman gets there._

_Steve: I still will not._

_Bucky: Challenge accepted._

_Steve: FML._

_Bucky: That’s what you’ll say to Stark._

_Bucky: *eggplant emoji*_

_Steve: *eyeroll emoji*_

_Bucky: *hearteyes emoji*_


	2. Chapter 2

“Adult swim!” Steve blew his whistle as the alarm on his watch went off. 1-2pm was his favorite hour of whenever he was working the pool shift. There was no splashing, no running, no screeching, and best – no diapers in the pool. Why people thought that things made to absorb urine wouldn’t absorb pool water was beyond him, but years in the military had taught him to never doubt the incompetence of human logic. 

“Mr. Steve?” A small voice at the base of his chair spoke up. 

He peered down to see one of his favorite townies, and the son of the resort’s on-site doctor, looking up at him. “Yes, Peter?”

“Aunt May wants to know if you need any Gatorade.”

Steve pinched his skin quickly to check his hydration and then calculated back to the last time he’d eaten any salt. It was only 83F, but with the heat index, it was pushing 90 and it was starting to give him Fallujah flashbacks. “That’s a great idea, Peter, tell May thanks and remember I hate the orange ones.”

The kid’s face split into a grin as he dug into the bag Steve just noticed was on his shoulder. “She knows.” Producing a red Gatorade and a bag of potato chips, Peter grabbed Steve’s giant water bottle and went to go fill it up. 

_“I have zero problems with kids, but, like, he’s around a lot,” Steve asked Darcy one rainy afternoon when everything was quiet._

_“May’s his aunt and she’s raising him on her own. We’ve all kind of adopted him, I guess. Growing up on the island can get lonely – especially once all the shoebies leave –“_

_“The what now?”_

_Darcy grinned. “It’s what we locals call all the idiots who take over our island every summer. Back in the early days, people used to carry all the stuff they’d need for a day at the Jersey Shore in a shoebox. The townies up and down the coast started calling them ‘shoebies’ and it’s kind of stuck.”_

_“So you’re a local?”_

_She nodded. “My dad’s the science teacher over at the high school on the mainland and my mom runs a flower shop down in Beach Haven. I started working for Tony about two days after he got this place. The guy before him was an entitled asshat who treated us all like garbage – Pierce, his name was – and once word started getting around that Tony was rebuilding stuff alongside the contractors, I decided to take a risk. So Nat and I are year-round, and when May isn’t here, she’s over at SOCH.”_

_“SOCH?”_

_“Southern Ocean County Hospital, the big one on 9,” Darcy sipped her iced tea. Wawa brand, he noted, as though there was any other kind in this part of the world. “She’s an ER doc there. We all watch Pete when she’s on shift.”_

_“Sign me up, then,” Steve said. “Just not my days off.”_

_“Oh, don’t worry, Rogers, we’re all aware about your days off.”_

_Steve blushed. “I just got a thing I can’t move once I set it.”_

_Darcy looked at him for a few beats, like she was trying to see past his eyes into something deeper. “Got it, Rogers. No worries.”_

Steve kept watch on the few adults who occupied adult swim but noticed one in particular. The redhead who’d been with Tony at that party a few weeks back. Nat said her name was Pepper and she worked at Stark Investments with Tony and that where Pepper went… 

His eyes scanned…. 

Tony followed. 

_Thank the Good Lord for sunglasses_ , Steve thought to himself, as his eyes found the object of his affections, stretched on a lounger with his ubiquitous phone and tablet at hand. Nat had told him that Pepper and Tony spent most of the summer down here, only heading back into the New York office when Tony _absolutely_ had to, but sightings of his crush were still rare enough to be exciting. Steve then winced slightly when he remembered his conversation with Bucky the last time he’d made the drive to Philly.

_“What is the literal worst thing that could happen?” Bucky said._

_“I could get fired.”_

_“You could get fired from a lifeguarding job – for which you are disgustingly overqualified – because you talk to the guy that owns the show?” Bucky said dryly. “I get that you have complexes about intimacy, Cap, but this one is going a little far.”_

_Steve glared at his best friend. “I don’t want to fuck this up, Buck. It’s a good job, with good benefits, and if I do good this year, I have a guaranteed summer job for the rest of school that’s not clear across the fucking country from you, so can we not make light that, please?”_

_Bucky looked down at his hands. “You don’t have to stay trapped here with me, you know.”_

_“I’m not fucking trapped,” Steve said in exasperation. “I’m choosing to stay here, but with the choosing comes some other shit that I’m not risking.”_

_Bucky looked up at Steve and blinked a few times. “So no fucking the hot guy?”_

_“No fucking the hot guy,” Steve said ruefully._

Steve had spent two and a half weeks since the party – when he’d discovered that the man who had made his jaw drop over Memorial Day weekend in a way no other man really had was actually his boss – concocting long, lazy stories about a life he could have if he wasn’t… himself. 

Whenever he spotted Tony around the resort, Steve stole every glance he could to memorize the long lines of Tony’s compact body so that he could sketch it safely in the confines of his room. He searched the internet for stories of the financial genius that had taken his father’s very powerful hedge fund to _exceptionally_ powerful levels within five years of full control. Steve looked at photos of Tony on the arm of women even he knew were famous and videos of interviews were Tony explained exceptionally complicated financial ideas in words anyone could understand. 

And if he was falling in love with a man he’d never said three direct words to, it was no one’s business but his own.

_____________________________

“So, how Pride do we want this to be?” Darcy asked Tony later on that night as they sat in her living room in the bungalow Tony’d built for her. “Like, the cast of _Glee_ or John Waters’ mustache?”

“I’m thinking Billy Porter at the Met Gala levels,” Tony responded as he sipped his scotch. 

“Excellent,” she rubbed her hands together. They got down to details, arranging the band, the extra catering, the themed foods, the decorations, until Darcy’s phone went off somewhere around 11:30. “’Lo? Hey, May.”

Tony got up from the table and wandered into the kitchen to put the lid back on his scotch and start the long – read: thirty-four steps – walk back to his summer cottage down the beach. Then he heard, _“Oh, no problem, Tony can do it.”_

“What are volunteering the benevolent billionaire for?” Tony wandered back into Darcy’s eyesight and caught her rolling her eyes. 

“Yeah, I’ll tell him, don’t worry, girl, we have him.” She hung up and looked at Tony. “They just had a level something bad trauma called in, and she was already supposed to be off shift two hours ago, so someone needs to get Peter down to Tuckerton to Science Camp tomorrow and since I happen to know your incredibly packed schedule tomorrow includes eating bagels and perving on Lifeguard Steve, you can totally take Peter, plus you are absolutely the biggest science dork I know.”

Tony cocked his head to one side. “Oh, Ms. Frizzle, that is the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“For the last goddamn time, I do not look like I drive a magic school bus.”

“It’s the hair, and your aversion to wearing patterns that match,” Tony grinned, kissed Darcy on the cheek and headed for the door. “And your blinding brilliance and ability to wrangle our summer children. A compliment, Lewis, I swear. I’ll go over there now and relieve whoever his night minder was.”

“It’s Rogers,” Darcy called, with a tone in her voice Tony didn’t quite appreciate, but knew better than to address. “Rogers was watching him tonight, so he’s probably on the couch if you wanted to avoid or assault him.”

“Thanks, Friz,” 

“Guard your carnal treasure, Stark!” 

“Oh, fair Darcy, that ship sailed, but your concern is noted.”

_____________________________

If it was possible to become a kid person after interactions with one kid, Steve was absolutely a kid person after a full night with Peter Parker. He’d watched him a few times before, mostly for a few hours at a time, but his shift that day had ended at 3 and he’d headed straight to May and Peter’s.

_May: He’s got his first day of Science Camp down in Tuckerton tomorrow and we have to leave around 7, so he needs to be in bed no later than 8:30. His phone and tablet sleep in the kitchen, and he won’t give you any trouble about that, but he will try to read by flashlight, so check in on him around 9:30. Thanks so much for this, Steve._

_Steve: May, he’s a great kid, I’m sure we’ll be fine._

They’d spent quite a while in Peter’s little workshop, where he was building a computer – which blew Steve’s mind right up – and Steve was happy to let Peter chatter away at him, explaining an entire world Steve knew nothing about. Dinner had been tacos, post-dinner activity had been more computing, and Peter had, indeed, gone to bed on time and without any complaint. 

May had texted around 9 to let him know that she wasn’t getting home when she thought she would, but would he mind staying around for a little while and of course he said he wouldn’t. So when there were footsteps outside of May’s around 11:30, Steve didn’t think much of it. 

And then Tony Stark stepped into the quiet room and Steve’s brain temporarily short circuited. 

“Hey, Rogers, right?” Tony said, casually and Steve nodded. “May’s got a thing, so I’m gonna crash here and take the kid to Tuckerton tomorrow, which is a phrase I never in my life thought I’d say, but then again, I never thought I’d willingly own property in Jersey, so we all probably live in the Upside Down anyway, but you’re relieved of duty.”

“What?”

“These are the jokes, Lifeguard Steve, so imma need you to keep up,” Tony grinned. “But yeah, you can stumble on home. I got the Parker house from here.”

“I have the second beach shift tomorrow,” Steve said in response. “I can drive Peter down to camp. I’m sure you have a million more important things to be doing than driving around South Jersey.”

Tony barked out a laugh. “I have _fourteen million_ more important things to do than driving around South Jersey, but I find myself with almost nothing better to do than take that kid to Science Camp, as his only fellow science nerd in this joint. So honestly, handsome, you can head on home.”

_Handsome_. Steve’s brain sputtered again. “Um, okay,” Steve swallowed. “If you’re sure.”

Tony pulled a laptop of the backpack he came in wearing. “Besides, one of the beautiful things about my job is that I can do it anywhere there is internet access, and since I pay Comcast a fuck ton of money to make sure this whole place has the fastest possible, I’m solid. Also, a great bonus as a babysitter, I’ve had insomnia since I was a fetus, so whenever May gets home, I can make sure she’s safe. Seriously, you’re standing there at fucking parade rest, how long have you been out?”

Steve gaped at him. _If all interactions with Tony are like this, I'm going to actually swallow my tongue pretty soon._

“My best friend is in the Air Force and I have fucked my way through several Fleet Weeks, trust me, I know parade rest. At ease, Captain.”

Steve’s brain grasped the first thing that made sense. “I've been discharged for two years and I haven’t told anyone that.”

Tony smirked. “I don’t let anyone near my team without a full check. Don’t worry, only Nat and Pepper know and they keep secrets better than I do, so you’re safe. Why you aren’t wearing that as a badge I don’t know, because let me tell you, some of the college girls down here would love to add your rank to their bedpost notches.”

Steve made a face that Tony interpreted wrongly. “Or dudes. I don’t discriminate.”

“No, it’s not that,” Steve said. “And, for the record, men, but I don’t talk about the army at all. _At all_.”

Tony blinked at him a few times. “Is that why no one knows you have a Silver Star?”

Steve’s jaw involuntarily clenched. “Correct, Mr. Stark.”

Tony held the silence for a few minutes before nodding briskly. “It’s Tony. Mr. Stark was my dad and he was a fucking dickwaste, so I go by Tony to anyone I like.”

“Steve is fine, Tony.”

“Great, then Steve, go home,” Tony emphasized ‘home’ and rose to shove Steve out the door. “Get some sleep, let me make some money and keep the communal kid safe, and I’ll see you when I’m back from my sojourn through the Pine Barrens.”

When Steve finally stumbled into bed a bit later, after sending his customary text to Bucky to let him know Steve was safe behind locked doors – one of the fun new aspects of their relationship post-deployment – he looked up at the ceiling and let himself laugh. 

“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph on all their pogo sticks, I am so fucked.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Down the shore" is the equivalent of "going to the beach", FYI, for those in the NJ/PA/DE region of the world. The "shore" only refers to New Jersey beaches, by the way, I still go to the beach in Florida and in Ireland, I go down the shore in Jersey. 
> 
> All the places and terms - including 'shoebies' - are real, with the exception of the beach club itself.
> 
> Thanks for the comments and kudos so far - I'm having a great time writing these two oblivious yahoos, so hopefully you have fun reading them!


	3. Chapter 3

“It’s going to pour,” Darcy said at the staff meeting. 

Tony waved his hand. “It has said it was going to pour every day for, like, a month and a half now and it hasn’t. Instead, we’ve just gotten this absolutely delightful humidity. We’ll be fine.” He got up and left Darcy’s office and she was reminded why working for a man who was famous for not believing in the word ‘no’ was a goddamn pain in the ass. 

“Like he can bend the actual weather to his whims,” Darcy muttered and picked up her phone. 

_Darcy: He has decided he’s a meteorologist._

_Nat: FFS, that man. Call Pepper. She’s the workaround._

_Darcy: I ordered the tents already._

_Nat: Which is why I’m putting you up for a raise, but still call Pepper. She’s the only one who can keep him from meddling_

Darcy blew her hair out of her eyes and rooted around in her kind-of-organized desk for a ponytail holder. _This is the summer I just fucking shave it all off._

_Darcy: Tony has decided to go work for AccuWeather. Give me a call when you can._

Darcy’s phone rung instantaneously. 

“I’m assuming this is about the long rant I just got about how Tony’s staff is afraid of a little rain and doesn’t know how to have a good time?”

Darcy rolled her eyes. “It’s more that we’re afraid of a tropical storm and I know how to have a great time, thank you very much, I just try to avoid electrocuting an entire patio of people in the process.”

“See, that’s where Tony can’t understand. Mild electrocution is an acceptable hazard.”

“Well, this isn’t his robot workshop,” Darcy retorted. “We have 250 people who have already paid for this thing and they’re calling for massive thunderstorms. So, basically, Nat and I are handling it, but you have to keep him off property until it’s all set up.”

“Tents, barriers, the whole nine?”

“Yeah, and I cancelled the fireworks” Darcy said. “Nat and I are working with the township and the police and it was all going to be fine but then he waltzed into my office and saw an invoice and started in on me.”

“Why was he in your office? He was supposed to be half way to Atlantic City by now for an investor meeting.”

“The lifeguard time clock is right outside my office,” Darcy said, unable to keep the smirk out of her voice. 

“Jesus Christ,” Pepper swore. “He’s out of control.”

“Like, I get that Rogers is hot, don’t get me wrong, would climb like a tree if he was into ladies, but… I have never seen Tony like this,” Darcy said. 

“I have some theories,” Pepper said, her voice trailing off. “But none of them will help at this moment, so leave the Meddling Genius with me and you and Nat just make sure the property is prepared. We’re the only official Pride party on the island this year, so we’re not cancelling.”

“No, I’ll organize a full-on _Singing in the Rain_ spectacular if I have to. Rogers has become the pied piper of the baby guards and he told me we’ve got two kiddos who are thinking about coming out at the party, so I want to make sure they have the safe space to do that.”

Pepper groaned. “I do not need him to be more perfect, but that is absolutely fucking precious.”

Darcy grinned. “I have double checked with him at least six times that he’s not bi, but he’s also using his powers for good and making my job four hundred times easier than it was last summer with Rumlow running around –“

“Tony still talks about how you fired him.”

“One of my best moments. Anyway, if about 6k could end up in the discretionary budget to cover all of this, I’d appreciate it. Nat’s projections say we’ll have it covered back by Tony’s Big Birthday Bash – or whatever we’re calling it this week – but I still gotta close June and July before we get there.” Of all the jobs Darcy thought she’d be doing in her life, bookkeeping was not on the list, but Nat was worse at math than she was at people skills and Darcy didn’t feel right outsourcing something like this when she fundamentally worked for a financial company, so she did all the basic bookkeeping for the resort and then let SI take care of the accounting nonsense. 

“Got it,” Darcy heard three clicks that said Pepper put her on speaker phone and moved the money right then. “Okay, talk soon, no climbing the help, Darce.”

“Please stitch that on a pillow,” Darcy replied as they both hung up. She busied herself with phone calls and emails and a few daydreams of the day when Tony would understand reality and boundaries, when there was a knock at her door. 

“Darcy?” 

She looked up to see a wild-eyed Steve Rogers, vibrating with an energy so intense it scared her a little. “Rogers, are you having a stroke?”

“What? No, but I just got a phone call, and I have a family emergency-“

“Go, we’re fine, you said the magic words-“ Darcy was already flipping open the staff rota to see who she could shift. _Fuck, I’ll just have to do it. I have the lifeguard license for a reason._

“Just like that?”

“Rogers, why are you still standing there?”

“I just-“

She stood up from behind her desk. “I’m about to change so if you want to be on this side of the door, be my guest, but I told you to go.”

His hand reached out and grabbed her shoulder. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

She looked him dead in the eyes and squeezed his hand. “Steven, I get that you don’t have a long history of employer flexibility, but around here ‘family’ means everything, however you define it. Whatever you’re doing in your brain that says this isn’t allowed, stop it, because it is. If I called Tony right now, he’d offer his driver to get you wherever you need to go faster, so for the love of God just go. You were in chair 6?”

He nodded. 

“Great, please keep me in the loop.”

He nodded one more time and then was gone, leaving Darcy to wonder about their enigmatic wonderboy for the nine hundredth time.

_____________________________

“Sam, you told me he’d be fine,” Steve ground out, his jaw clenching so hard that he was kind of afraid he’d need dental work.

Sam Wilson, Director of Trauma Services at the Philadelphia VA Hospital, stared Steve down with a fire in his eyes that would have terrified lesser men but only served to make Steve more frustrated. 

“Steven, we have talked about trauma. Over and over again. You keep wanting Barnes to go in a straight line and he can’t. He can’t, Cap. That is not how trauma works.”

Steve swallowed a howl in frustration. “Three years, Sam. THREE FUCKING YEARS he’s been fighting to come back to normal-“

“I swear to God, Cap, if you use normal in this office one more time-“

“- and you idiots took him outside ONE FUCKING TIME and he’s back to square one.”

“He is not back to square one and we are not idiots and if you cannot get a hold of yourself, I am throwing you in the shower to cool you the fuck off. Now, if I don’t leave right now I’m going to punch you, so I’m going to go get us some water, you are going to calm the fuck down and then we are going to talk about helping Barnes how he needs to be helped and not how you want it to happen in your privileged white boy fantasy. Got it? Good.”

Not waiting for an answer, Sam strode out of his office and Steve collapsed in one of the familiar chairs. 

_“Steve, how quick can you get here?”_

_It had been a normal Tuesday. He’d been off on Sunday and had gone to see Bucky, as usual, and was looking forward to the weekend of Pride festivities at the resort. The pool, where he was guarding that afternoon, was pretty empty because the tide was out and the ocean was unusually warm for June, so he mostly kept an eye on the wading pool. When one of the bartenders came to get him, telling him he had a phone call at reception, he hadn’t thought anything of it. Until he heard Sam’s voice._

_“Steve, Code Frosty, how quick can you get here?”_

_“90 if I catch all the green lights,” he replied, looking at his watch and calculating how long was left on his shift. “But I have three hours left on my shift, so I need to go talk to my boss.”_

_“Okay, text me when you’re on the Ben Franklin and I’ll make sure your code is active.”_

He’d driven at least 80mph for most of Rt 70 as he hurdled towards the city, going over every possibility in his head. ‘Code Frosty’ was Bucky’s designation when he shut down, which usually happened after a period of intense violence against someone else. The last time had been about 18 months ago, and he choked one of his nurses so hard the woman had a bruised esophagus. 

When he got to the hospital, he was told Bucky was under sedation to give his heart rate a chance to balance and that he’d be able to see him in an hour or so, but that Dr. Wilson was waiting for him. 

_“We have been friends for how long?” Sam asked Steve as the pair sat in a hallway at the Rammstein base hospital._

_“I was in basic, so… four years.”_

_“And in four years, have you ever known me to lie to your ass?”_

_“No,” Steve whispered, knowing exactly where Sam was going._

_“What happened to him is a big deal, Stevo,” Sam whispered, “and he’s not going to be the same person when he wakes up. Rebuilding his brain into something functional is going to take time, a lot fucking longer than rebuilding his body, actually, so I need you to trust me.”_

_“I do trust you, Sam,” Steve sighed. “I just…”_

_“He gave you power of attorney for a reason, pal,” Sam continued. “If you honestly believe he’d want to give up, then there’s a bed for him at that place in upstate that essentially lets them all become cogent vegetables. If you think he’d want to fight, if you think he’d want to scrape back redemption from the claws of those motherfuckers, then let me take him to Philly.”_

_“I don’t know anyone in Philly,” Steve said._

_“Well,” Sam grinned big. “You know me, and it’s only 2 hours from Brooklyn so you can go see your ma if you want, and most importantly,” the man produced a folder from behind his back, “the University of the Arts takes GI Bill money. I got an exceptionally uncomfortable IKEA futon with your name on it until you get on your feet.”_

_“I have seven months left,” Steve said._

_“Perfect, because by then, Barnes should be off the worst of the sedatives and we’ll be on our way to figuring out the prosthetic. Perfect timing to have his platonic soul mate show back up.”_

_“You have a goddamn answer for everything,” Steve growled._

_“The PhD? It means I drink and I know things.”_

_“Okay, Tyrion Lannister, fine. We’ll do it your way.”_

When Steve had rocked up to the City of Brotherly Love two years previous, he’d been a shattered shell, but the shell appeared perfect so no one had any idea. The Department of the Army desperately wanted him to stay on, or at least to join them on a massive P.R. tour. He’d tried to turn down the Silver Star, but when he found out that he could use the status to bully more people into prioritizing Bucky, he’d accepted. He’d enrolled in the graphic design program at University of the Arts and had thrown himself into school, work, and Bucky. He got a job at a comic book store that was two bus rides away but was worth it to him because it was in one of the neighborhoods everyone else forgot about. 

The decision to get his lifeguarding certification was a whim, if he was honest. The VA had been offering it – the City always needed guards – and Buck had talked him into it, saying that at least he’d get to work on his tan. 

_“I get that Philly is a humid sweatbox in the summer, but we survived fucking Iraq without actually melting, so I have confidence in your body’s boiling point,” Bucky had laughed. “Besides, you’re always staring at people so you can sketch them. This way you get paid for it.”_

The job at Barnegat had been both Bucky and Sam’s idea. 

_“This summer is a good chance to let the baby bird spread his wings a bit,” Sam told Steve. “You’re only 90 minutes away, the pay at the resort is better than at the city, and Stark Investments – which owns the joint – is always trying to hire veterans. Long Beach Island is a fucking dream of a place to live for the summer, buddy, just go.”_

And until that day, it had been a really fantastic summer. He was the oldest lifeguard by a few years and had fallen into being the leader of the pack, in a way. Steve was used to it – it’s what happened in nearly every team he’d been on since his growth spurt back in high school. He still remembered what it felt like to be tiny and scrappy instead of large and scrappy and so he did his best to make room for everyone on the team. 

No team he was on, however, would hold a candle to the one that he and Bucky had built when they were scrawny idiots running around Bed-Stuy and Sam was telling Steve that he wasn’t being a good teammate. 

_Okay_ , he thought. _I can listen_. 

When Sam came back, he put a bottle of water in Steve’s hands and sat next to him. “Ready?” 

Steve nodded. 

“We’re going to start at the beginning, and we’re going to skip all of the you yelling at me, got it?”

Steve nodded. 

“Right, so as you remember, Barnes signed up for the visit to the Art Museum to test out his new arm in public. He was in the Rodan exhibit when he hit his panic button and we found him in a corner, folded completely in on himself. It took about three guards to unfold him so that we could get him on a stretcher – he broke one of their arms, by the way, so we’ll deal with that later – and he’s been largely nonresponsive since. We had him on a few medications to bring both his heart rate and body temperature down and hooked him up to an EKG to see if that would tell us anything. 

“He ripped out two IV lines before we got him down, and the only word he spoke between then and now is ‘Captain’, so we are hoping to God you have some idea what triggered him.”

Steve worried his bottom lip. “What’s in the Rodan room?”

“An ice cream sundae shop. Paintings, Steve.”

“Wait,” something ticked over in Steve’s brain. “Isn’t the Colin Davidson exhibit on right now? The one of the paintings of Pearsall’s photos?”

“The what now?”

“Jesus Christ, we should have…” Steve ran his hands over his face and dug out his phone, quickly pulling up a website. “Colin Davidson is a Northern Irish portrait artist that I’ve been following for a while and he did a few paintings of photos that Stacy Pearsall did for the Veterans Portrait Project. Their co-exhibit is up here, and if Bucky wandered into there-“

“No,” Sam said, pointing to something on Steve’s phone screen. “It’s an additional cost. We didn’t send Barnes with any money.”

“I gave him some cash on Sunday,” Steve said. “He said it was for snacks but I bet you that idiot planned this as a test to himself.”

Sam blinked. “So the portraits are of?”

“Veterans with physical changes after combat,” Steve said. “She actually asked Bucky to sit for a photo session about a year ago and he told her no, but I know he kept the card.”

“So, he set himself back,” Sam shrugged. “He made a choice, it back fired. We can work with that.”

“But it’s my fault,” Steve muttered. “I gave him the-“

“Okay, stop right there, Cap,” Sam said. “One, we have enough complexes in this building with you dragging your martyr one in here with you. Two, Barnes is a grown-ass man who can make choices for himself. He pushed too hard this time and he’s going to pay the consequences for it, and we’re going to get him through it, but he made a choice and if you take that agency away from him by putting the blame on yourself, then you will set him back. He made a choice.”

Steve ground his jaw, but nodded. 

“Trauma literally rewires your brain, Steve, we have talked about this. Part of Barnes’ therapy here is re-re-wiring it and that’s a delicate process. The schedules have helped – the structure and the fact that we give him control over them – and you’ve been a true hero helping him stick to them. I don’t know how you’ve wrangled a shift job into making sure you never have to swap them, but good job. 

“What today taught us is that he’s probably 90% of the way to re-entering society, until we account for his stubborn ass trying to fly before he can walk. You enable that part of him, so if I’m going to sign him out to your care, you need to get this under control. Did you hear anything about a job for him?”

“Yeah,” Steve swallowed. “Darcy told me they’d find something for him and she’d just want to talk to you about accommodation and the fact that idiots shoot off fireworks a lot at our end of the island.”

“Noise cancelling headphones and I’d want him in the same house as you, but I’ll drive down myself this week and talk to your boss.”

Steve took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I yelled.”

“No, you’re not,” Sam smirked. 

Steve chuckled. “He’s all I got, Sam. Ma’s…. If you think I just want things to be the way they were before we shipped out, you should meet my mother. I love her, but…”

Sam smiled gently. “I get it, man, I do. What you have to decide now is if you’re going to be your Mom or you’re going to adapt along with Barnes as he learns his new self. Like, what are you going to do if he dates a girl different than the ones he used to?”

“Well, I hated everyone he dated before, so that would be a welcome change,” Steve laughed. 

“Fair enough,” Sam laughed. “But what about if those memories he’s lost never come back? What if high school is still something you tell him stories about instead of something he remembers? What if he never wants to leave Philly because Brooklyn isn’t home any more? Do you see my point?”

“I do. And I promise I’ll work on this. Can I see him now?”

Sam made a call to see if Bucky was awake and then had one of his staff members show Steve to Bucky’s room. They’d moved him back into his actual room once the IV came out and Bucky was tucked up into his bed with a tired, and slightly blank look on his face when Steve walked in. 

“Well, that was fucking eventful,” Bucky rasped, as though he hadn’t used his voice in a while. 

“Was it one of Davidson’s?”

Bucky laughed, the sound scraping out of his throat. “No, that would make sense and God forbid I make sense. It's great, by the way, the exhibit, you should go. But it was some kid, talking about how great he was doing in Gears of War and how many people he was sniping. I wanted to grab him and scream at him that it wasn’t a game, but that if it was, I would be the best because I was the best, and I didn’t want to do any of that, so I went to sit down and the next thing I knew, I was here. They said I broke a guy’s arm.”

“Your enthusiasm for self-preservation has always been strong, punk,” Steve replied. 

“How am I going to pay for that?” 

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll figure it out.”

“You can’t keep figuring out my messes, Stevie,” Bucky said. 

Steve put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “Well, I can do one more. You can solve the next problem, okay?”

“I’m so sorry, Stevie,” Bucky’s voice broke slightly. “I just want to be better.”

Channeling Sam, Steve replied. “You are. Remember, Sam said nothing is linear any more, you’re fine. You’re making incredible progress and Sam’s going to come down this week to make sure the resort is going to be a good place for you and it’ll all be okay. I promise, Bucky, it will all be okay.”

Bucky was quiet for a few minutes. “Jerk.”

“Punk.”

“End of the line.”

“End of the line.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not great at linear stories - just like Bucky's brain isn't either - but I promise I'll tell you what happened to our favorite one-armed wonder before too much longer. 
> 
> And yes, this will be a Pride party for the ages.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This thing was supposed to be a one-shot, but the boys had a different story to tell.

“Mr. Stark-“

“Kid, I swear-“

“Tony, what do I do with this?”

After truly bonding over Peter’s projects in Science Camp, Tony had offered to help Peter take his small Raspberry Pi-based computer and build something more intense. May willingly gave up her dining room to the adventure and Pepper had quickly learned that if she needed her boss, he was probably at the Parker’s.

It was late on the Thursday night before Barnegat’s big Pride fest and May had switched with everyone she knew to have the whole weekend off, so tonight was a late shift and Tony had volunteered for Peter-sitting. 

_Tony: Well, we’re plotting world domination and the strippers are coming at 11 – is 10 too young for that? I can never remember._

_May: Anthony you aren’t funny._

_Tony: Correction, I am hilarious._

_Tony: Stop worrying about your kid. I haven’t been arrested in ten years and that was for a minor misunderstanding._

_May: You were having sex with four people on an open balcony in Singapore._

_Tony: My more limber days. Again, sweet cheeks, calm down. We’re building a computer that we’ll use to power the robots he wants to try next. I’m converting him to engineering._

_May: He’s 10._

_Tony: I went to college at 14._

_May: You’re a supernatural genius._

_Tony: Spoiler alert, Maybelle, so’s the kid._

“Can we put Siri in this?” Peter asked as he focused on a piece of copper wiring Tony was teaching him how to wind. 

“No, we can- No, Peter. Siri, honestly, you wound me. I can introduce you to Jarvis, though,” Tony grinned and pulled his phone out of his pocket. “J, my man, meet the kid.”

“Hello, Master Peter,” a British voice intoned from the phone. 

“Hello?” Peter said hesitantly. 

“Jarvis is an AI I built, what, four years ago?”

“3 years, seven months, and fourteen days, Sir,” Jarvis replied. “And I have served at your pleasure ever since.”

“You hear that, kid? That’s sarcasm. My favorite feature of all the stuff he’s learned,” Tony grinned and reached over to the pile of wrenches. “I need a… no… yes, aha! Anyway, Jarvis, want to tell the kid your birth story?”

“Must I, Sir?”

“Fine, I’ll do it,” Tony grinned. “Bezos sent me one of those stupid Alexa things and her flaws bugged me. Nat bet me $10 that I couldn’t build a better one.”

Peter blinked a few times. “You built a self-evolving Artificial Intelligence system on a $10 bet?”

“I get bored easy.”

“Thank you, Master Peter, for keeping him entertained,” Jarvis intoned. “It is not an easy feat.”

Peter giggled, delighted to be talked to like an adult and let in on this. 

“Knock, knock,” a voice called from the door a few seconds later. “Did I hear Jarvis?” 

Darcy stepped into the room, followed by Steve, who was carrying a Crock-Pot that smelled illegally good. 

“Yup, just introduced him to Peter.”

“Hey J,” Darcy called and Steve looked around befuddled. 

"Ms. Lewis, a pleasure as always," Jarvis replied.

“He’s my AI,” Tony explained to Steve. 

“Like, in _iRobot_?”

Tony blinked. “Yeah, kinda, but better because Asimov suffered from a limited imagination and a lack of genius, but same principle.”

Steve nodded and Tony noticed, not for the first time, how adorable his blush was as it crept up his ears. “I have the pork that needs to simmer and May said we could do it here?”

Peter leapt up. “Oh, yeah, Mr. Steve, Aunt May said you were coming, we cleared a spot in the kitchen, in here.”

As the blonde followed Peter into the kitchen, Darcy plopped herself on May’s overstuffed sofa. “It’s too damn hot,” she said. “I’m actually kind of worried all the glitter will melt into the concrete before the rain washes it away on Saturday.”

“You know, the boiling point of plastic is-“

“Spock, ask yourself if I care.”

“Friz, you gotta be a lifelong learner,” Tony retorted, which earned him Darcy’s middle finger and her closed eyes. “You tired, babe?”

She nodded, without opening her eyes. “I love this job, Tony, I love being your little den mother to this group of misfits you keep collecting – which we’re going to have a talk about the damaged Wonder Twins you hired last week because that girl scares me – and we’re all a better use of your money than the booze and loose women you used to blow –“

“- please, those women were anything but loose-“

“-that’s disgusting, go wash your mouth out with whiskey, but yeah, I’m fucking exhausted.”

“Well,” Tony said, a rare burst of sincerity worming its way out of his mouth, “you’re really fucking good at being a people wrangler.”

Darcy barked a laugh. 

“No, I’m serious. People talk to you and they listen to you, it’s like you’re the Pied fucking Piper around here.”

“No, that’s Steve,” Darcy said. “I’m the social worker stroke mom. He’s the one they follow like little ducklings. Speak of the devil,” she paused as Steve and Peter walked back in the room. “Aight, pork has been delivered, I’m going to make sure the youths who were congregating on the beach have gone back to their hovels for the night. Rogers, you coming?”

“Mr. Steve said he’d show me his robot drawings!” Peter burst excitedly. 

“Yeah,” Steve rubbed the back of his neck, a nervous tick that Tony found problematically charming. “Was gonna run back to the house and grab a few, is that okay?” He looked at Tony, who shrugged. 

As Peter scampered enthusiastically after Steve, Darcy threw a smirk in Tony’s direction. “Jarvis, what’s Tony’s heartrate?”

“Elevated, Ms. Lewis.”

“Fuck off, Darce,” Tony said, a tinge of exhaustion hitting his voice. “Don’t make me regret I showed you the file.”

_“Mr. Stark, what’s this?”_

_Tony sat quietly across from Darcy, fiddling his fingers in a way that felt vulnerable and that is not a thing she had seen her boss be._

_“Pepper should be here for this,” he muttered. “Okay, biting the bullet. You’ve worked for me for, what, two years now?”_

_“Yes, sir.”_

_“That’s longer than a lot of folks last,” he smiled wryly. “You’ve joined the elite Pepper and Nat club.”_

_“Thank you?”_

_“It comes with a 20% pay increase, by the way, the club, and I think the girls have a secret handshake and I know they have a group chat, so anyway, that’s not why I’m here. I’m here because all of my research says to trust you. Can I?”_

_Darcy blinked. “I mean, in a mafia sense?”_

_“Maybe,” Tony deadpanned, but the twinkle in his eye told her he was bluffing._

_“I have few pairs of shoes that I can’t get blood out of, so a heads up would be good, but sure, you can trust me.”_

_He reached into his ubiquitous laptop bag and pulled out a file. Sliding it over to her, he said, “there are seven people on the planet who know what’s in this file. You’ll be the eighth. Pepper, Nat, Rhodey, Happy, two doctors, and my lawyer. Take your time.”_

_She was desperately confused and insanely curious as she flipped open the file to see a few official documents on Stark Investments letterhead._

_‘On September 25th of 2014, Tony Stark was abducted by a terrorist organization while on vacation in Morocco,’_

_Darcy’s eyes shot to Tony’s. “This is like an episode of ‘I, Survived’ isn’t it?”_

_“I can promise that at no point did I have an axe sticking out of my head. Keep reading.”_

_‘While Stark Investments negotiated for his safe return, Mr. Stark was tortured extensively. Over the course of three months, he suffered four broken ribs, a shattered pelvis, two minor strokes, and one heart attack. He was kept alive by an intrepid doctor kidnapped alongside of him, who was killed during Mr. Stark’s extraction.’_

_She looked up at Tony. “The word extraction is intense.”_

_He nodded, his eyes never leaving hers. “I stole a gun and killed seven of them before Rhodey had figured out where I was. Extraction is the military term for that, apparently. Then I got smuggled to Rammstein, because Pepper was petrified that if it got out this wasn’t just one of my sex romps through Thailand or something that the board would take power from me and our board chair at the time was a monster- anyway, keep reading.”_

_“I’d rather hear it from you,” Darcy said quietly. “If you’re willing to?”_

_“Fourteen surgeries put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but I only have 70% lung capacity and my heart is being held together by two, not just one, but two pacemaker type things, but I’m trying to replace them with just one, and about four hundred rods and bolts, and you need to know because I can’t miss any medication and I mean any._

_“Pepper and Nat are going to be traveling more and they don’t like the idea of me alone and the docs all say that being near the water calms me, so they want to shove me down here for you to babysit.”_

_“Not babysitting,” Darcy said quickly. “But winter down here isn’t fun.”_

_“It’ll be a balance. I still have to be publicly living in New York, but the way SI has been needs to… anyway, I can’t keep… my father… If I’m…”_

_“Tony, you’re fine, no need to explain,” Darcy said quickly. “So, essentially, if you’re down here I have to make sure you never miss your meds and that you’re appropriately fed and watered?”_

_“When I tinker, Pep calls it, when I tinker I forget to eat and a few of the drugs need food, so, yeah.”_

_Darcy chose her next words carefully. “You were, what, 24? This all must be a big change for you.”_

_Tony started laughing. “Oh, Jesus H., you have no idea, but anyway. You in?”_

“Tony, I accost because I care, old man” Darcy grinned. 

“Older, Darcy Lewis. Older. And wiser.”

She snorted at that so loudly that she woke Peter and May’s lump of a chocolate lab, Rafiki, from his snoozing spot in the corner. “Oh, Fik, I’m sorry, buddy!” She stooped to scratch his belly and nuzzle his neck as they heard Steve and Peter come back up the sidewalk, accompanied by Peter’s non-stop enthusiastic chatter. 

“It’s a good thing he has a good judge of character in the people he chooses to stick to,” Darcy said quietly. 

“Lifeguard Steve,” Tony said loudly, “show us these drawings!”

And then, before anyone seemed to know it, it was midnight and Peter was in bed, but the three adults were all on May’s front porch as Darcy and Tony told Steve stories of past Prides. Darcy had been talked into ignoring the potentially miscreant youth when Tony produced a bottle of Bushmills. 

“Jesus fuck, I have to sleep,” Darcy said. “You staying until May gets home?”

Tony nodded. “I got my obligatory three hours of sleep this afternoon, so I’m good. See you tomorrow, Friz.”

She rolled her eyes and kissed his forehead, gave Steve a fistbump and headed out. 

The two men sat in silence – which was comfortable for neither of them, but they also weren’t going to say that. 

“Well, I guess-“ Steve started. 

“So, I mean-“ Tony said at the same time and the men laughed. 

“Do you really only sleep for three hours?”

Tony nodded and took a sip of his whiskey. “Remember when I told you that I’ve had insomnia since the womb? It’s true. In college I’d go for three or four days – caught in a coding marathon for whatever software I was fucking around with – until Rhodey met Nat, who then introduced me to Pepper, and all of a sudden I had a minder who was making me eat vegetables and sleep for more than fourteen minutes at a time.”

“So you’ve known them for a long time?”

“I met Pep when I was sixteen and she was twenty. Rhodey and Nat were both legal, so maybe 21, 22? I don’t remember exactly, but I remember Pep’s 21st, well, kinda, and so yeah, we’ve been kind of a unit since then,” Tony admitted. “They’re the only family I had for a while, to be honest, which I’m only being because I’m pretty drunk, which Nat is going to kill me for tomorrow, but they’re why I’m alive.”

Steve nodded, “I have someone like that. They’re good to have.”

“No comments about the alive bit?”

Steve looked over at him. “Do you want to tell me?”

Tony blinked a few times and shook his head. 

“Then tell me when you want or don’t. Your story is yours.”

Tony sat with that for a few seconds. “That is fucking refreshing, Rogers, I’ll tell you.”

Steve laughed. “When I first enlisted, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was only recently not a thing any more, and since molasses moves faster than the U.S. Army, it was very much still a thing. I came with a best friend who I’d always been kinda flirty with just to piss him off and a zero percent tolerance for bullying or harassment, so people started making some assumptions. I don’t like people in my business and I quickly realized how powerful that was – that I could control what I said, what I confirmed, what I told. I can’t control what they think, or the rumors, or the assumptions, but I could control my own truth. I didn’t need to come out to people who weren’t worth that kind of vulnerability – Bucky knew, the couple of guys I fucked around with knew, my ma knew, and that was that.”

“That is the longest set of sentences you’ve strung together in my presence, Rogers,” Tony said quietly. 

“Well, you’re usually taking up all the oxygen for the both of us, Stark,” Steve smirked back. 

“I have a lot of questions,” Tony said after a few seconds, “but I’m gonna follow your lead. Anything you want to expand on from that little charming monologue?”

Steve looked over at Tony. “That family emergency, the one where I came back asking for a job for a guy with one arm? That’s Bucky. He’s my, well, really, he’s my brother. Thanks for hiring him.”

Tony nodded. _So, what do you mean brother? How did he lose his arm? Is that why you have your Silver Star? What is a Silver Star? Is he the best friend you flirted with to piss him off? Does that mean he’s straight? When did you come out? How did you come out? Will you go out with me?_ He literally bit his fist to keep from asking any of those questions out loud before he choked out. “Of course, Rogers. You said he’s a good guy-“

“-the best.”

“And I can’t keep being the only one around here who knows how to deconstruct and rebuild the filter motor, so having your boy sounds like a plan.”

Tony saw Steve’s shoulders relax slightly and patted himself on the back for keeping his mouth shut.

“Well, I’m going to head back in and –“ _head immediately to the bathroom to jerk off in the shower because you are so fucking perfect I’m in literal pain_ – “check on Peter. See you tomorrow?”

Steve nodded and ambled his way down the path towards his cottage. About ten steps in, he turned around and called, “Oh, Tony?”

“Yeah?”

“I volunteered to be one of the guards carrying you in on Saturday. I’ll try to make sure my fingers don't slip. Night.”

Tony bit his lip to keep from laughing. _Great, he's gorgeous, he's smart, he's good, and now he's also a flirty shithead. I'm doomed._


	5. Chapter 5

In the end, both Tony and Darcy were right. The glitter didn’t melt into the concrete, but man _did it pour_. Taking direct inspiration from Billy Porter being carried in on a litter at the Met Gala earlier in the year, Darcy and Tony had planned a royal theme – telling everyone to come dressed as their favorite royalty, fictional or non. Tony opened the festivities, being carried on the shoulders of Steve and another guard named Paul. Much to Tony’s chagrin, Steve’s fingers had indeed not slipped. 

Steve talked to so many teenagers that day, so many who’d heard from a friend of a friend or an aunt or something that he was out. They had questions – when did he come out, did his family kick him out, was he scared – that he was more than happy to answer, but the weight of carrying their emotions had gotten to him. 

Darcy had told him to expect it – he was their only non-Tony out staffer that year that was customer facing – but she’d been clear with the staff that Steve was not their Magic Gay Vending Machine or something and to not actually direct guests to Steve. He’d had been shocked to learn that Tony employed a few social workers and counselors to just hang out for the weekend, in case any needed to talk. But then, once he thought about it, he wasn’t surprised at all. 

From the minute set-up started at 8am, to the minute the last guest stumbled into various Lyfts at 3am, Steve had neither been alone or off his feet. 

With one very specific exception. 

Somewhere well after the costume fest, and after the sun had gone down, and in a break in the monsoon, he had found himself sitting on a bench on the beach, savoring some silence. He’d just texted some photos to Bucky – who was starting that Monday – and was enjoying the sounds of revelry being slightly distant. 

“Penny for your thoughts, soldier?” Tony’s voice was quiet and… tired, as he took a seat next to Steve. 

“This is the best Pridefest I’ve ever been to,” Steve said simply. “It was ridiculous, and sincere, and I was not prepared for the sing-alongs-“

“Steven, our people invented sing-alongs-“

“But this is something special, Stark,” Steve concluded. 

There was silence from the older man, which Steve had not anticipated. 

“I never got the chance to come out,” Tony said. “I didn’t really even know what that meant when the first boy I kissed got paid $5,000 by Hello! to report in on my use of tongue and if I was a twink. I was 12. Like I knew what a twink was?”

“Jesus, Tony.”

“I mean, I’m sure 12-year-olds now know because the internet, but it was 2000, and I was the only one I knew who had a fucking smartphone but that’s because I built it myself because I was tired of not being able to hack into Howard’s emails from bed. Anyway, that kid – Tristan, his name was because of course it was – he made that decision for me,” Tony sighed. 

“I went to my first Pride that summer, snuck out of the house, gave my mother a fucking heart attack, I’m sure, and just watched. I watched all those people just… not give a fuck. And then I saw the AIDS banners and something about Stonewall and I realized that if I wasn’t given a choice to be labelled as in this community, I could do something about how I was going to behave in it. I have been obsessed with consent, _obsessed_ , and I made sure to never, ever instigate anything with any dude who wasn’t out, and along the way I learned a few things. First, I really like sex.”

Steve laughed. “Well, that’s a good thing to learn.”

“Two,” Tony held up a finger, ignoring Steve. “I am quite good at it, with all genders, sexes, or persuasions.”

Steve’s ears flared. _Do. Not. Look. At. Tony._

“Three,” Tony said. “I will guard other people’s choice with my fucking life.” The sentence ended on a growl. “Do you know the #1 cause of teenage homeless in this country is asswipe parents kicking out their queer kids? That one gets me, because I am positive that if I wasn’t Howard’s magic money making genius, he would have had me out on my ass so fast that’s how I would have earned a living.

“I’m not being humble here, I know I’m a genius, but I’m really only one at two things: making money and building shit. Not buildings, but computers and robotic arms and looking at your Bucky’s file, I may start dabbling in prosthetics because what’s out there is terrible, and anyway, I’m rambling, but I had no fucking idea what I was doing when I won this place, but the best miracle that ever happened was when Nat found Darcy and she’s like the island whisperer and she mentioned a few years ago that her best friend from high school committed suicide instead of coming out and that just… Steve, that just destroyed me. 

“Being good at making money does not mean being good at spending it, by the way,” Tony laughed. “But I’m learning. I’m learning how to use what I create to make home for other people, especially people who don’t have any other home.”

“I have no idea if any of that makes sense, but that’s my way of saying that this weekend is the most important thing I do all year and I saw you talking to those kids and I can’t thank you enough. I just can’t.”

Steve caught the hitch in Tony’s voice on the last few words, but knew better than to say anything. Instead, he reached over and took Tony’s hand. He could essentially hear Bucky wolf whistle as the electric shocks of attraction went from his hand straight to his dick, but this moment felt too…. Something to do anything more than hold Tony’s hand. 

He could feel the callouses Tony got from his precious tinkering, but also the well manicured skin of a man who shook hands for a large part of his living. He felt the warmth and let it ground him and decided that he could answer honesty in kind. 

“When I was 13, Sandy Dwyer kissed me after soccer practice and I felt nothing. Well, I felt Bucky’s knee in my stomach a few minutes later because he was fucking into that chick, but once we settled that-“ Steve finished over Tony’s low chuckle – “we figured out that I was probably pretty into dudes. I didn’t tell anyone else until I was 19 and it was time to do something about it.”

Steve shrugged. “It wasn’t a really intense emotional thing for me, but I know that’s because of Bucky, and also because it when it was and where I lived. I threw up a few times before telling my ma, mostly because she met my friend Peggy and started making all these comments and I didn’t want her getting her hopes up. I wasn’t sure what she really thought, actually, until the day marriage equality became legal and she put up on Facebook about how I just needed to find a nice fella.”

Tony laughed and squeezed Steve’s hand. “God, I hope you do someday, Rogers, I’ve known you for a hot minute and I know you deserve that.”

Steve didn’t bother fighting the blush, but he did have to take his hand away because otherwise he was going to maul Tony’s mouth and he missed the part of the employee manual where shoving your tongue down your boss’ throat was acceptable. 

“I just figure I was lucky. There are so many kids, so many adults, who don’t have the luxury of a Bucky or a Ma. I love those people who give out Free Mom Hugs, and last year I spent Pride painting a shelter in Philly for HIV+ people who were homeless, and so Darcy wanted me to answer a few questions for some adorably earnest teenagers? Who the fuck am I to say no? I was born on third base in terms of family, why the fuck wouldn’t I want to get as many RBIs as I can for everyone else?”

When anyone asked Tony, at any given moment for the rest of his life, when he knew he had to marry Steve Rogers, it was the sloppy baseball analogy with Steve’s voice dripping with earnest goodness. 

They sat for a few more minutes before the rain started up again, someone called for Steve, and they headed back inside, where Tony made a beeline for Nat. 

“Natasha, my little stroganoff, I have a small favor to ask of you.”

“You’re both adults, so I just need a signed form from both of you that he won’t lose his job once he dumps your dramatic ass,” she responded, without even looking up from her phone. She turned the screen to show him their employee manual. “I just double checked.”

Tony blinked at her a few times, mouth slightly agape. “I really need to stop being surprised when you are six steps ahead of me.”

“It would save emotional energy.”

_____________________________

“First shift,” Steve smiled at Bucky, who was doing his very best impression of someone who had their shit together.

Bucky nodded, trying to swallow the lump that had formed in the back of this throat and ignore the way he couldn’t quite keep his good arm from jittering.

“Do you feel ready?”

Bucky shook his head and he could feel Steve about to leap him and absolve him of adulthood, to tell Bucky he could head back to the hospital or just stay in their little house all day, but that was not happening. 

“I am never going to feel ready,” Bucky said softly. “That’s what this disease does to me, this way my brain is, ya know, broken now. It tells me I’ll never leave Iraq and Sam says the only way I’ll learn its wrong is to get more evidence. So, I’m going to clean a pool filter and work on an engine and get more fucking evidence.”

Steve nodded and checked his watch, his expression frozen in what Bucky thought of as his “I am concerned, and potentially disappointed in your choices, but I will remain stoic” face. “I’m meeting Sarah and Juan for breakfast, so I’ll see you on your first break? Do you want to recite your schedule?”

Bucky took a breath. “7:30-8:30 is breakfast in the staff dining room. 8:30-11 is paperwork with Natasha Romanov, who is my supervisor. 11-11:20 is my first break. 11:20-1 is for activities to be determined by Natasha, who you said will tell me to call her Nat. 1-2 is lunch. 2-3 is when I will meet Tony Stark and Pepper Potts, and I promise you I will not talk about your dick-“

“-fucker, will you focus-“

Bucky smirked, “3:10-3:30 is the second break and then after my second break, I have no schedule but that’s okay because at one of the earlier meetings I’ll get one and this kind of structured ambiguity is important.” The last few words were said with a certainty that Bucky didn’t possess, but he’d chosen to trust Sam’s instructions. 

“You’re going to do great, Buck,” Steve said, slapping his personal hero on the back. “I’m on the beach today, starting at 10, so slap some sunscreen on your pasty ass and come visit.”

 _You can do this, Barnes, you can do this_ , Bucky repeated the mantra in rhythm with his footsteps as he walked to the office. He was greeted by a redheaded woman with a small smile and an air of professionalism that somehow calmed him. 

“Mr. Barnes?” the woman rose from behind her desk and gestured to a small table. “I’m Natasha Romanov, the ops manager around here. I’m so glad you could join us this summer.”

Her smile was warm, and he noticed that she intentionally offered her left hand so he could use his right to shake and she didn’t even blink at the hook so maybe, just maybe he was going to survive this day. 

“James, please,” Bucky offered. “And honestly, I know taking chances on vets straight from the ward isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.”

“Nat, then, and you’ll quickly find that we run quite the island of misfit toys around here. You show up sober and on time every day and generally we’ll give you a job. Bonus points if you can actually do things, but our boss is a big believer in second acts in life. So, Steve tells me you were a mechanic before you enlisted?”

“Hobby, yeah,” Bucky rubbed the back of his neck with his good hand. “I worked on bikes and cars, mostly, but I’ve fixed a few lawnmowers in my day.”

Nat smiled. “Well, our only other full-time mechanic is Tony, and he’s more of a completely-deconstruct-it-even-though-a-screw-would-do kind of guy, and so basic pragmatism is a good feature. We have some OSHA videos and paperwork and some other stuff to get through together, so shall we?”

And thus began James Barnes’ first day of civilian work. He had thought this place sounded cool from everything Steve had told him, but he figured out pretty quickly that it might just also be special. Everyone was friendly, if not downright warm, and he was pleasantly surprised that Sam’s prediction that seeing the ocean would be helpful was correct. Sand was still a problem, but as long as it wasn’t blowing in his face, he was okay. 

He put faces to names, met a lot of Steve’s colleagues, rustily flirted with a bartender named Stacy, and only put his foot in his mouth twice with Stark. As he headed into the last chunk of the day before he clocked out – schedules were important, routines were mandatory – he was feeling optimistic about the summer. A strange feeling. 

His final task on his list – he was so glad that Nat also liked lists – was to check out the heating coil in one of the ovens. Never having to deal with a heating coil before, he’d spent the break looking at YouTube and figured he could at least give it a look. He headed into the kitchen to see a girl standing with her head in the freezer. 

“Um, hello?”

She whipped around with a big smile on her face. “Sorry, it’s so fucking hot I’m resorting to desperate measures. Hi, I’m Darcy and you must be James. Nat said you’re going to check Barry out?”

“Barry?”

“The oven, I call him Barry for Barry White because he makes all sorts of growly noises when I’m baking. I mean, it’s fine, as long as I only put cupcakes on the upper left they bake fine, but if I tell Tony he’ll take the entire damn thing apart and I can’t be without an oven for a day, so you can check it out? That would be great.”

 _This has to be what people facing a hurricane feel like_ , Bucky thought, but out loud he said, “I have no idea, doll, but I’ll give it my best.”

“Oooo, I forgot the Brooklyn. I’m a 1st generation immigrant down from Queens, myself.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Bucky admitted as he put his toolbox on the counter. 

Darcy laughed. “My parents are, like, Queens people to their very core, and still tell people that’s where we’re from, but I was born and raised here. Trips back to see family, though, are like pilgrimages to the old country. I half expect my mom to say novenas as we drive.”

“Well, Queens, as long as you don’t root for the Yankees, I think we’ll be okay.”

“Jesus Christ, who do you take me for? I said I’m an immigrant, not an idiot,” she grinned. “Phillies.”

“Well, fuck,” he said, pointing to himself. “Mets.”

“Yeah, you and Rogers, I figured,” she smiled as her phone chirped. “Oh, I gotta go do something for Pep, you okay here?”

A few hours later, when Bucky was sitting in their little living room waiting for Steve, he reflected that it had been the first day in a long time where no one talked about his arm. And that made it a fucking stupendous day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Tony in this fic is fascinating me - he's five years out of his torture and Howard is long dead and, of course, CW never happened, so his trust issues aren't completely out of control - and I'm really enjoying writing him. The basics of who is are allowed to show and it's really fun to write. The next chapter will unpack that a lot more. 
> 
> Also, Find me on [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/betheflame1) or [Tumblr](http://betheflame.tumblr.com) for more on these yahoos. You can also submit prompts and cajole me into writing faster - it usually works.
> 
> Thanks, as always, for the kudos and the comments! They definitely fuel the writing - along with Lemon Oreos and Wawa Coffee :-D


	6. Chapter 6

June turned to July and Tony was spending far more time away from the resort than at it. He and Steve hadn’t really ever had a moment again after Pride Party night, but Steve was fairly distracted by helping Bucky settle in and prepping for the madness that would be July 4th weekend. 

_Fairly distracted_ probably wasn’t fair – he had just trained himself to not look around every corner for Tony, to not ask Darcy or Peter or Nat if they had talked to him, to not… pine. No, that wasn’t true, he had not trained himself to not pine, he had just trained himself to not pine _outwardly_. 

It was late, nearly midnight, on the 2nd of July and he was sitting on his little front porch with Mumford’s latest album playing quietly off his phone when Pepper Potts strolled up to his house. 

“He’s been in Vienna,” she said. “We both have. There was a hack of a… it doesn’t matter, but Tony’s the only one on the planet who could fix it and so he’s still there. I thought you should know.”

Steve was quiet, realizing how badly that internalization of the pining was going if his boss’s boss’s boss thought he needed to be informed of the whereabouts of his crush. “That sounds really shitty.”

Pepper barked out a laugh and gestured to the chair, “Mind if I?” When Steve gestured in the affirmative, she sat down and closed her eyes. “I’ve been awake or traveling for nearly 36 hrs, so some of this is going to come out really fuzzy, but please just go with it.”

“Okay…”

“Tony was going to ask you himself, but… anyway, our friend Rhodey usually brings a unit from McGuire down here for the 4th. We tell them they can publicly identify as military or not, we don’t care, we just feed them a fuck ton of food and let them party a bit and then wrangle them back onto the bus. Rhodey can’t make it this year – he’s gotten called away to I have no idea – and he’s sending one of his folks, a Lt. Danvers, and we need someone to be her point person.

“Tony’s going to be in Vienna, still, and I have to head up to New York, and with Darcy and Nat running everything else, you’re the only one Tony trusts to help manage a bunch of chaotic monkeys on temporary leave that the Air Force folks will most likely turn into.”

Steve was quiet for a minute. “Does Rhodey know who I am?”

“Yes,” Pepper said simply. “But only because you’re the only man under the age of 25 to currently have a Silver Star and he tells me you were in the running for Medal of Honor before you asked to be discharged.”

“The Medal of Honor would have been a fucking PR gag,” Steve spat out before remembering to calm himself. “He tell you anything else.”

“Some things, yes,” Pepper said calmly. “But I can easily forget them if you want me to.”

Steve was quiet for a while, appreciating Pepper’s patience and reflecting that it was probably honed over many years of working with Tony. Finally, he cleared his throat. “The official story is that I saved the team, that it was my heroics,” Steve ground out the word, “that saved valuable military intelligence, that I displayed… I was doing my job, Pepper. That’s it. They spent years telling me that I, as Steve Rogers, was a cog in a wheel, one of many, an expendable body in the war of American rightness on the rest of the world. Then I did that job, the one they beat into me, and now they want me to be thankful they… No.”

She remained quiet for a few seconds. “I got Employee of the Month once,” she said calmly, as though knowing Steve needed a minimal reaction. “Not from Tony, because he has no idea that even exists, but from the guy I worked for before him. He gave it to me so I would sleep with him.”

“Did you?”

“Did you accept the medal with a smile on your face and a song in your heart?” She retorted back, with a smirk on her face that told him she knew he knew she'd never.

He laughed right out loud at that. “So you know how I feel.”

“I wouldn’t ever presume, Steve, I really wouldn’t. But here’s a few things I do know. I know that James is alive because you dragged him for two miles to get him to a medic. I know that fourteen other soldiers under your command all testified that without your exact decision at the exact moment you made it, four spies would have been compromised and you all would have been dead. I know that soldiers are a lot of things, but liar isn’t usually one of them, and I know that the last time Rhodey wanted to meet anyone Tony knew was somewhere around 2015 when Tony met Neil Degrasse Tyson at a cocktail party.

“When Nat hired you, she promised you that she’d never tell, that none of us would ever tell, and so I won’t. Rhodey knows and I’m sure this Danvers person does because you’re a little famous in that world, but if I ask, they’ll make sure it stays mum. All I really care about is if you can babysit Air Force personnel without making it about an Army vs. Air Force thing.”

“Ma’am, that is a bridge too far,” Steve grinned and felt a certain warmth when she matched it. “Tell Tony I have his back.”

She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “You do, don’t you.”

He had no idea what to say to that as she continued. “Since we ran background checks on you, I guess I should ask what you know about Tony.”

“Um, he’s a genius and could buy the country of Moldova if he wanted.”

“Ah, so you read the _Forbes_ piece,” she smiled. “I think he’s up to Mexico, too, but I haven’t checked. Anything else?”

“He graduated from Penn at 17 and Wharton at 18, took over SI at 21 when his dad died, and grew the fund to 14 times what it was within five years. They’re famous for ruthless takeovers of small technology firms and he’s famous for writing all of the software and algorithms they use to do it.”

“He famous for anything else?” She raised an eyebrow, daring him to say it out loud. 

“He’s… open with his affections,” Steve blushed a bit. 

Pepper chuckled, “You’re adorable. Tony has fucked his way through most of the developed world, but affections? No, he’s stingy with those.”

Steve looked at her very slowly to see her eyes were trained on his. 

“I like when you told Tony that everyone’s story is their own because he has some that only he gets to tell, it’s one of the reasons I trust you with him, which I have told exactly two other people in the last 10 years,” she held up her fingers to illustrate her point. “Nat and Darcy, so you are now in a fairly elite club.

“Tony was taught a long time ago that his worth to people was transactional. His parents needed him for status, and then for his brain, but I’m not convinced they actually cared for him. His family butler, Jarvis, that was functionally his emotional dad, but Jarvis died when Tony was 12, so even though he had a father, he lost his dad. Howard was a drunk who beat Tony – that’s why he never has his shirt off where there are cameras, the scars – and somehow, through all of it, Tony protected this core bit of goodness within himself. 

“A few years ago, he had a pretty big change of heart about his life. The details are his to tell you, but I think he was starting to realize he was becoming Howard and he decided to be Jarvis instead, to be the man Jarvis raised him to be. He cut down on the partying, re-evaluated how he was spending his money, and started shifting SI into really different directions. He got a lot of flack for that last one and there are people in the financial world who can’t stand him, but the Tony you met is, this man who he is now, it’s the best version of him yet. 

“I know he seems like an Energizer Bunny made of Teflon, but I promise you, he’s really a marshmallow.”

“I know,” Steve smiled and let the silence hang for a few minutes. He could tell that Pepper wanted something more from him, something like an actual response, but… no. That wasn’t on the cards for the night. “You can give Danvers my number. I cannot promise that I won’t give the flyboys some shit, but I’ll take care of it.”

Pepper took out her phone, presumably to text Lt. Danvers, and they chatted for a few more minutes. He asked some details about what Tony was doing, even though he couldn’t understand any of what Pepper was saying, and he wasn’t about to analyze why he was so hungry for information about Tony’s day-to-day life, but after a short while she said goodnight. 

He headed into his house to find Bucky sitting wide awake on the sofa. “How much of that did you hear?”

“They blew up my arm and shattered my pelvis, they did nothing to my hearing,” 

Steve flipped him off and grabbed a beer from the fridge before settling down next to Bucky. 

“We gonna talk about why you’re being so fucking weird about telling anyone you served?”

“Nope,” Steve said, taking a pull on his beer. 

“Can I talk about how the minute you hear Stark’s name I’m pretty sure you go half-hard?”

“Not unless you want a graphic description of rimming again,” Steve replied. 

“What would happen if I told everyone we called you Captain America?”

“I’d remind you that I got an A in Advanced Interrogation Techniques.”

“You’re a fucking punk,” Bucky growled, in a way that was full of affection. 

“And you’re a damn menace,” Steve replied with a slow grin. “I’m going to bed.”

“You’re allowed to be happy, you know that, right? Whatever fucked up kind of Catholic penance you’ve put yourself in over those kids… there was nothing you could have done. You know that?”

Steve didn’t reply for a beat. “I have the early shift tomorrow, so I’ll see you for lunch.”

“Stevie.”

“Night, Buck.”

_____________________________

If Steve was honest, it was a powder keg, the whole day was a powder keg. However, at this particular juncture, honesty was not one of Steve Rogers’ strengths.

It all started with some honest fuckery between the flyboys and Bucky – who hadn’t been around a group of non-injured veterans in a long time. Steve had been sure Bucky would be reticent – he didn’t love new people all that much, and everything at the resort was so new. But about two hours in, Steve realized he had forgotten one key thing: the only person who rivaled Tony Stark for the ability to put on a song-and-dance routine when necessary was James Buchannan Barnes. 

Charm just _fucking oozed_ out of every single one of his pores and between him and Darcy flitting about the party and that a lot of the Air Force personnel had apparently pre-gamed… the party went south of family friendly pretty quickly. He and Nat sorted a way to herd the rowdiness onto one section of the beach, put Darcy, Danvers, and Bucky in charge of that group and then Steve focused on making sure Nat didn’t kill someone in frustration. 

It was hot, even for July 4th at the shore, with temperatures pushing 95F well into the evening and humidity so thick you could cut it with a knife. Steve was reminded of so many nights when he was deployed where the stupidity was heat fueled and he could feel apprehension curling in his gut for most of the day. At one point, he pulled Danvers aside. 

_“Is this unit normally like this?”_

_She shook her head and downed a bottle of water. “They’re a new unit. Three put together. There was some… trauma. And most of the are just pains in my fucking ass. They’re being a special brand of stupid right now, though, I’m sorry. Colonel Rhodes said Stark normally has security?”_

_Steve nodded. “We do, but there’s also a lot of phones here and I’d rather not be the guy having to explain to Buzzfeed why we arrested a bunch of flyboys on America’s birthday.”_

_“A: flyboys is my least favorite phrase, so please excise it from your vocabulary and B: I totally understand.”_

_Steve grinned despite himself. “Sorry Lieutenant. Flypersons?”_

_“Acceptable. Jingoistic, but expected from a dog face.”_

The wheels went completely off the wagon, though, after the fireworks. 

Bucky had gone inside for them with some noise cancelling headphones that Darcy had found for him – during which time Darcy also disappeared, which pissed the fuck out of Nat who said something about writing her up for the first time _ever_ – and had emerged more inebriated than he should. Officially, Buck was off the clock and had been since set-up, but in all of Steve’s years of knowing him, he’d never have behaved that way. 

“Darcy,” Steve ground out, with his eyes on Bucky and a group of pilots. “What the fuck did he drink.”

She looked wide eyed. “Jell-O shots with Everclear.”

“JESUS CHRIST THOSE ARE NOT ON THE MENU,” Steve roared to be heard over the music. _Plus, he is not supposed to drink on his meds, not more than one or two in an entire day and I think Everclear counts as at least 300._

“I KNOW,” she yelled back. “ONE OF THE FLYFUCKERS GOT A LOCAL TO BRING THEM.”

They both breathed for a half a beat before taking off in different directions, Darcy saying she was going to find Nat, and Steve off to find Danvers and shut this whole thing down. He tripped over his own feet and nearly face planted in the sand when he heard Bucky’s voice. 

“And then,” the man slurred slightly, “motherfucker looked right at the guy and told him he could do this all day. In perfect Farsi.”

 _Oh motherfuckingshitcuntgoddamnit_ , Steve’s brain slung every word he could think of together. 

“Bucky!” Steve called, forcing joviality into his voice. “I could use your help over here!”

“Schteve!” Bucky responded. “I was just telling my new friends about how fucking amazing you are.”

 _Fuck a duck, I forgot he was a lovey dovey drunk_. “Buck, they don’t want to hear that.”

“Yeah we do, Captain America!” Called one of the lads standing near Bucky.

And that, when he would explain to Tony later what happened, that’s the moment he snapped. 

“Get. That. Name. Out. Of. Your. Mouth.” Steve said with a tone that seemed to penetrate even Bucky’s Everclear soaked brain. “That is name is not for you.”

For whatever reason, the crowd got quiet and all eyes were on the small group around Steve, Bucky, and Douchecanoe Who Had Spoken. 

“You know what, fuck it. Danvers says you guys have all been in Asia, right? Not Iraq, not Afghanistan, right? No one has seen active combat missions? Right?”

No one answered, so Steve asked again. “Captain Rogers asked you all a _fucking question, flyboys_ , have you seen active combat?”

“No, sir,” one of them replied, his voice cracking slightly on the ‘sir’. 

“Thank you. Well, let me tell you what it’s like.”

He vaguely heard someone call his name at this point, like he was being called away from a cliff he was jumping off. 

“Let me tell you what it’s like to smell death all of the time. To know that the next sandstorm might either choke you to death or hide the men who will. To know that every single fucking time you see a child, every time, you know that that kid will never have a childhood and that you’re supposed to be glad about that because their religion is wrong or their skin is or they were born in the wrong country and you’re supposed to believe that’s justice.

“And then, here’s what’s even better, they take your body as their own. They jack it up on their methods and their B12 shots and their ways to make you keep going even when you can’t, even when your feet are bleeding and your lungs are screaming. And that’s those of us who come back whole. Whole, what a fucking joke. I haven’t been whole since God fucking knows when.

“And then you’re discharged, and you’re sent back to ‘normal life’ except what can that even possibly mean when everything you’ve wrapped your life in is on the other side of the ocean, when the only thing you feel good at any more is wasting time and killing enemies. Then, try to get a cup of coffee in a city where half of the population looks like the supposed enemy because the world isn’t simple, not that it ever was, and then let’s talk about this day. Let’s talk about all of the pundits who will scream about patriotism, but never spare a breath to take care of those of us who give our souls to this land that they love. Because –“

And that’s when Steve realized three things at once: he was crying, Bucky was crying, and Tony was standing right behind him. 

“Righto, Rogers, let’s head to bed,” Tony said quietly in his ear. To the rest of the party, he called out. “Folks, I think we’ve all seen some fireworks, eh? Happy birthday, America, and all that, Nat? Darcy? Carol?”

“On it, boss,” Nat’s voice called and Steve let himself be led towards the cottages. 

“Mine’s this way,” Steve leaned at one fork in the road. 

“Great, well mine is this way and that’s where we’re going,” Tony said firmly. 

“I’m –“

“I swear to any god I can name right now that if you try to tell me that you’re fine I will have Pepper kill you with her shoe.”

Steve opened his mouth to respond, tasted the salt of his tears, and simply let Tony lead him. 

“I thought you were in Austria.”

“I was, got a flight this morning because if I looked out at one more stunning vista of mountains and cows I was going to go crazy, here we go, gumdrop, up the stairs, right, great job, now, sit.” Tony pushed Steve onto the couch, where Steve found himself instinctually curling in on himself. Tony came back a few seconds later with a bottle of water and a cool cloth. 

“I get panic attacks,” Tony said quietly. “This is how Pep cleans me up.” He began to gently wipe Steve’s face in a way that made Steve’s heart just crack wide open and feel like all his nerves were live wires. 

“I have to make sure Bucky is okay,” Steve responded. 

“That is absolutely the last thing you have to do right now, because one, I can guarantee you that he’s not, and two, you certainly aren’t. Darcy’ll mind the One Armed Wonder. Let’s just focus on that oratorial explosion we had back there.”

Steve closed his eyes. “I didn’t mean any of it.”

“Oh, you are a fucking liar,” Tony scolded, but it didn’t have any bite. “You meant every damn word and I’m going to guess that’s the first time you’ve said any of it out loud?”

Steve was quiet for a bit before he nodded. “I’m not sure I believe all of it.”

“That’s more accurate.”

The two men sat for a few minutes just like that, Steve curled up on the couch and Tony sitting on the floor in front of it, gently wiping Steve’s face and holding his hands. 

“I was kidnapped," Tony said softly. "It was a whole thing, there’s a lot wrong with my body now, but I can’t handle being in spaces I can’t find a way out of any more. I can’t fly commercial, literally physically unable to, because I can’t fly that plane. I can fly mine. I can’t fly theirs, I have no control, and I can’t handle that. I can’t explain what it’s like for people who just tell me to get over it or that make jokes about it. I can’t. So, if I was tortured for three months and you felt this shit for _years_ , I can’t even imagine…. I should have thought about that today would be hard for you, I didn’t even…”

“No,” Steve croaked out. “If you had asked me, I would have said it was fine. I’ve always been fine. I don’t even know what came over me.”

“And that, love crumpet, is not a mystery we’re going to solve tonight,” Tony said quietly. “I usually like to shower and then crawl into bed. Does that sound like something that would make you feel marginally human?”

“I work at 7,” Steve croaked as he shifted his body to a sitting position. 

“I have a policy that anyone who works the party doesn’t work first shift,” Tony said, his tone confused. 

“I switched with Maria so she could go home for the night.”

“Of course you did, you wholesome martyr,” Tony rolled his eyes. “Well, I’ll put in a good word with your boss and I think we’ll work something out. Go, shower, and then I’ll show you the guest room.”

As soon as Tony heard the water running, he checked his phone. Unsurprised to see fourteen unanswered ones on the management group chat, he opened it. 

_Pepper: I have a call into Rhodey for him to discipline the jell-o shot asshole. They were specifically told what was included._

_Nat: Carol also said more showed up than were supposed to, and that this unit is a fucking mess, which I don’t think Rhodey knows._

_Pepper: Well, he’s about to know._

_Pepper: I'll be down in the morning, by the way._

_Nat: Carol’s embarrassed._

_Pepper: Oh, Christ it’s not her fault. Send her a fruit basket or something, from everything I'm hearing, those assholes were sneaky and they knew what they were doing._

_Nat: Dan found two of them in the showers with one the Rasmussen girl. The middle one._

_Pepper: She’s 16!_

_Nat: Yeah, like I said, Rhodey has some investigating to do._

_Pepper: Did you check on Darcy and James?_

_Nat: James is absolutely conked out on my sofa – he really is not supposed to drink with some of those meds. I’m worried he’s going to wake up vomiting._

_Tony: Good call. I’m going to take Rogers Patrol if one of you can watch over Barnes?_

_Nat: Yeah you are._

_Nat: Sorry, that was out before I could stop it._

_Nat: I know I don’t have a heart, but mine broke for Steve tonight. Holy fuck, what a speech._

_Pepper: I don’t know how we escaped without that being livestreamed, but I’m going to blame the fact that the tiki lights burned out and it was too dark._

_Tony: He’s right, you know. Every fucking word._

_Nat: No shit, but he doesn’t know he means them yet._

The water shut off and Steve emerged in a towel and Tony nearly dropped his phone. “Um, I just realized I don’t have any clothes that aren’t covered in sunscreen and sweat? Do you have a pair of shorts I can use?”

Tony snapped to. “Two seconds.” He rummaged in a drawer and threw Steve a pair of basketball shorts Tony wasn’t sure he’d ever wash after getting them back. Gross, Stark. That is fucking gross.

“Thanks, Tony,” Steve whispered, his blush evident. “For… thanks. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Oh, Steven Grant Rogers,” Tony whispered to the closed door. “What am I going to do with you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the support for this weird little fic - it really does mean the world.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for the slight delay, y'all! got caught up in some work that forced my muse on the back burner. but don't worry - I don't believe in orphan fics, so this will finish.

_Did I swallow sand last night?_ Bucky smacked his lips together and swallowed a few times, trying to locate moisture. 

“Good morning,” Darcy’s voice said softly, shocking him enough that he tumbled his way off the couch. He sat up with a bit of a wild look in his eyes, as though he was trying to place himself. 

“You’re on Nat’s couch, it’s July 5th, you drank a lot more than you were supposed to last night and I’ve been on sentry duty to make sure you didn’t, I don’t know, seize or something. What’s your hangover cure? Coffee?”

Bucky nodded. “And toast,” he croaked out. “How much did I drink?”

“Well, that is the question of the day, Barnes,” Darcy’s voice was tight. “Yesterday afternoon, you told me to make sure you only had three beers between 12 and 5, which as far as I know you kept to, and then nothing after that, which you did not keep to, and so I don’t really know, but I do know that you were a fucking dumbass enough to do goddamn Jell-O shots at some point.”

Bucky groaned and leaned back onto the couch. “I’m a goddamn idiot.”

“Yes,” Darcy said as she produced coffee. “Toast’s coming up. Butter?”

He nodded and took a sip. 

“When’s the last thing you remember?” She asked, somehow making her tone cautious and definitive at the same time. 

He winced slightly, raking his brain. “I remember being in the kitchen,” he winked at her and noticed a slight blush, “and then I put on the headphones but they didn’t really work and then nothing.”

“Nothing?”

He paused. “No, not really.”

“That honestly explains so much,” she said under her breath. “Okay, imma rip the band-aid off here. You were a fucking dickshit to Rogers last night and I think he’s in the middle of a breakdown, but Tony and Pepper are minding him, so let’s focus on you.” As she gave him the narrative of the night as she remembered it, he had to throw up twice – once from the alcohol and once from shame – and hadn’t felt so… disgusting in a long time. 

“I need to go see him,” Bucky started moving and was stopped by Darcy’s firm hand on his arm. 

“No, right now, you need to shower, because trust me, but you also need to get your own fucking head back in order. Know what you’re going to say to him before you go over there.”

“You missed your calling as a drill sergeant,” he quipped. 

She cackled. “I’m a social worker who also substitutes at the high school and I spend my summers managing this circus. My life would make a drill sergeant cry.”

_____________________________

The sun woke Steve up the next morning, but the smell of coffee brought him fully into the waking world. He stumbled out to the living room to see Tony banging away on his laptop.

When Steve groaned a ‘morning’, Tony lit up. “Oh good, not dead. I’m good at physics but trying to shift your dead body was going involve pullies, so yay. Coffee?”

Steve mumbled in the affirmative, “lots of milk and no sugar,” and within moments of taking the first sip and settling on the couch, he was feeling more human. 

“Thanks for this, Tony,” he said quietly. 

Tony waved him off. “Please. Mi casa es su casa, etcetera. I got a text from Darcy that Bucky made it through the night, by the way, without any problems. Just a lot of snoring. I think her crush on him waned a bit.”

“Her what now?”

“Oh, have you not noticed our fair maiden pining away at your broody bestie? I didn’t think she was being subtle,” Tony replied. 

“No,” Steve said, rubbing his hand over his face, “missed that.”

He was quiet after that for a few minutes, a quiet that Tony misinterpreted. “Oh shit, sorry.”

“What?” Steve was confused. 

“You and Barnes are…”

“Oh Jesus no,” Steve barked out a laugh. “No.”

Tony felt his entire self sag in relief but refused to show it. “Oh, okay.”

Steve smirked in his direction. “I mean, I do like mouthy brunettes, but Buck’s my brother.”

 _He likes…_ “Got it.”

Steve was quiet again for a few beats. “The day I saved all my men I also killed a classroom full of children.”

Tony quirked his head. “Personally?”

“My intel guy, Dustin, he’d hacked into one of their com networks. I speak Arabic pretty well, and a bit of Farsi and Kurdish and I was learning Turkish, so I was usually the one in charge of communicating with the locals,” he took a sip of coffee. 

“You… how many languages do you speak?”

“Six,” Steve said confidently. “Well, six with any level of competency. I have phrases in some others.” He shrugged. “I was sick a lot as a kid. Ma got me a copy of a Rosetta Stone for Spanish and I was hooked. Spanish, French, Arabic, Norwegian, German, and Russian are my best.”

“I have Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, German, and Portuguese, so we’re basically the United Nations,” Tony quipped. “Continue.”

“International business genius,” Steve grinned. “Anyway, I’d been talking to one of the insurgent groups for a few weeks and they thought I was a mole. Or, we thought they thought, until Dustin intercepted some chatter that they were going to bomb the barracks we were in to teach me a lesson. I had about seven seconds to make a decision, so I got on, said I was glad they were taking care of my mess for me, and gave them coordinates.”

Steve took a deep breath, his voice shaky. “The coordinates, I told them, were different than the ones they had because I’d sent my best men away the night before on some mission for I can’t remember the lie I told, but I sold it and they bought it and I have a medal and I really shouldn’t. I gave them the first coordinates I could remember that my brain tagged as ‘not us’, and then got my guys out of where we were – which was outside the city in Halabsa – and back into Fallujah proper.

“Two days later, I found out that the coordinates I’d remembered were for a restaurant we thought was possibly a front for gun running, which was nestled in between a school and a mosque. Forty-five people died – including twenty children. But I got a medal for bravery.”

Tony was quiet. “That’s a mindfuck.”

“I can see their point,” Steve conceded. “I’m not an idiot, I was sent over to Iraq to protect American lives first, innocent Iraqi lives second, but most importantly to kill anyone who would kill us. The restaurant was probably trafficking guns, I probably saved countless other American lives, but the fact still stands that if we had executed a drone strike, it would have been at, like, 2am and not 10am when those fuckers blew up a city block to try to kill me. My life is not worth the lives of forty-five Iraqi civilians.”

“Actually, Cap,” Tony said quietly, noting Steve’s slight tense at the nick name. “It is. That’s the economy of humanity we live in.”

Steve opened his mouth to protest, but Tony kept talking. “In how we do our human budgeting, you are worth a lot of lives, actually. We paid for you to become really fucking good at your job. Really good. Your service record reads like a goddamn comic book, to be frank, and my tax dollars went towards that. 

“I’m not sure we should even be over there, but if we are, then I want the fucking best we have to offer helping us get out of there quickly and that’s what you are – the best we have to offer. So yes, your life is worth more to me than folks I’ve never met. Sorry.”

Steve processed that for a minute. “I get it. I do,” he sighed. “But the thing is that I knew some of those kids. They’re the ones who nicknamed me Captain America. I used to play football with them and give them piggy back rides and help them find their dogs when they ran off. I’d been working in Halabsa for months and I knew those kids. So you asked once why I don’t talk about the award, or my service, it’s because I had to trade the lives of twenty kids for the lives of nine men and that will never sit well with me.”

Tony was quiet at that. “I don’t think it should.”

Steve grinned wryly. “You are the first person who hasn’t tried to correct me.”

“Eight people died trying to rescue me when I was kidnapped. Eight. Including the doctor who worked on me, so I get it, on a level, I get it.”

“You mentioned that before, the kidnapping, can you, will you tell me about it,” Steve asked tentatively. 

Tony pursed his lips and wrung his hands a few times. “I got kidnapped a few times as a kid, actually, and it was always for ransom. None of those were particularly terrible – no one wanted to hurt me because they were convinced Howard wouldn’t pay if I was hurt, little did they know he did it enough on his own, anyway. So I thought this time would be like those times.”

“I’m guessing it wasn’t?”

Tony barked out a sardonic laugh. “No. This time they wanted my brain and they seemed to be okay with destroying my body in the process. My rib cage is more metal than bone, my hip can tell you when it’s going to rain, and my heart needs some serious electronic help to keep me alive. I used to have two pacemakers – one that was working on my heart, and one that was a reverse magnet to keep out some shrapnel that was threatening my heart – but I figured out how to get it down to one device, so that’s something. My life is entirely dictated by medication and breathing is sometimes a real challenge.”

Steve was quiet for a few minutes. “How long?”

“Did they have me? Three months. And then it was about two months of surgeries. Pepper created an entire series of vacations and meetings that I went on – I think at one point I was on a yoga retreat at an ashram – but we managed to keep it all under wraps.”

Steve’s braid whirred. “That’s when you bought this place, wasn’t it?”

Tony smiled behind his coffee cup. “Not technically, but it was when I started to give a shit about it.”

“And the panic attacks?” 

“They’re better now, but still a thing,” Tony shrugged. “Being near the water helps. Darcy, Pepper, and Nat have created a kind of human safety net for me. They make sure I eat and I take medicine and all. Pep makes sure I do more work that I love and less that bores me, the usual stuff people do after a life-threatening thing.”

Steve nodded a few times and let himself get lost in thought. Tony seemed to take this as a signal to pull his laptop back out and do some work. Steve let him clack away at the keyboard for a few minutes and then quietly started talking. 

“The human cost, the economy you talked about, you feel that strongly, right? Because they decided your brain was worth your health.”

Tony froze. “You motherfucker, I’ve never thought of that.”

Steve started laughing, a joyful sound that cut Tony to his core. “Not just a pretty face over here, Stark.”

“Oh, but what a fucking face,” Tony retorted, with a flirty wink. 

The men let the moment stretch between them before Steve said he should get going and Tony said he understood and reminded Steve to not beat himself up about the night before and said they’d see each other around. 

As Steve stepped out of Tony’s, he took a deep breath of morning air, winced slightly at the sunshine, and made his way for Darcy’s where he hoped Bucky still was. On his way there, he waved at Peter, who was scampering towards Tony’s bungalow, and detoured to his quickly for another cup of coffee, a shower, and a clean set of clothes. 

Fortified and feeling like he had the appropriate armor for this battle, Steve turned the corner to see Bucky sitting on Darcy’s front rocking chair, clad in sunglasses. Bucky gave a nod of greeting and gestured to the chair next to him. 

“I hear we had quite a night,” Bucky said in way of greeting. 

“I have several questions about that bruise on your neck,” Steve replied as he took a seat. 

“It’s been too long for you if you have questions,” Bucky retorted with a smirk. “But rest assured, I wasn’t blackout when that happened. That I remember. What I don’t remember is anything after the fucking fireworks started going off.”

“Anything?”

“Darcy’s gone through it with me, so let me apologize and ask exactly how would be best for me to grovel for the rest of our natural lives.”

Steve waved his hand. “I haven’t really slept, so it’s given me a lot of time to think, and let’s just leave it at we both fucked up and move on.”

Bucky was quiet for a few minutes. “So, if you’re not going to talk to me, are you at least talking to Stark?”

Steve returned the quiet and then slowly replied. “I am talking to you, and I am talking to Stark, I’m just not interested in a big re-hash of last night where you and I both have to relive embarrassing things and we end up forgiving each other anyway and so let’s just skip all the emotional bullshit and move on.”

Bucky took a long sip of his coffee. Their conversations weren’t worthy of Sorkin or anything, but they were rarely this stilted. Also, Steve was always pushing Bucky to talk. _Something_ , Bucky thought, _was amiss_.

“Okay, Stevie, if that’s what you want –“

“That’s what I want-“

“Then we’ll do that.”

Steve nodded firmly and then smiled. “Darcy?”

Bucky smirked. “Turns out we both have a thing for mouthy brunettes who are smarter than us.”

_____________________________

“Mr. Stark?”

Tony focused on the algorithm he was writing, ignoring Peter completely. 

“Mr. Stark?”

Tony continued to ignore Peter.

Peter was getting frustrated. “MR. STARK.”

Jarvis cut in. “Master Peter, I do not believe Sir will respond to that name.”

Peter rolled his eyes quickly. “Tony?”

“Yes, Peter?” The older man turned his full attention on the boy. 

“Can you check my program?”

Tony nodded and showed Peter how to run an automated assessment on his program, reminding him that before he would ever put something into any sort of production, someone else should test it for him as well, and the pair watched as the test began to run. 

“Tony, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course, Underoos,” Tony responded. 

“I wear my pajamas into the clubhouse one time,” Peter muttered. 

“It wasn’t one time, it was the entire first summer I knew you and it was adorable, carry on.”

“Nat said that you skipped all of high school.”

“Yeah, kind of,” Tony confirmed. “Why?”

“Did you like that?”

“Well, that’s an interesting question, Peter,” Tony replied. “Did I like skipping all those grades, no, the answer is no, not really. I was excited to not be bored any more, but I never felt, I never really had friends, not for a long time, not until I met my friends Rhodey and Nat and then they introduced me to Pepper. I didn’t go to prom or to football games or to any of the other things that Hollywood said I was supposed to have and so, no, I didn’t like it.”

“Huh,” Peter said. “I’m sorry you were lonely.”

The simplicity with which Peter said that statement took Tony’s breath away. _In all the years I had told the parents I didn’t like school, where I begged them to homeschool me so I wouldn’t get beat up at gym any more…. All the years, they’d never once apologized, never once told him that my feelings were valid, and in, like two minutes, a kid…_

“Thanks, Peter,” Tony smiled. 

Peter preened for a few seconds and then the program was done and there were changes to be made and more tests to run and before Tony knew it, it was 12:30 and time for Peter to head back to May’s for lunch, as it was one of her rare days off. 

As he waved the boy away, he caught sight of Steve and Bucky on Darcy’s front porch. _Hope they’re working this out,_ Tony mused, _because I may not know Rogers that well, but I know there was no healthy version of that man that doesn't include Barnes in his life._


	8. Chapter 8

July dragged into August, and the month brought more and more vacationers along with unceasing humidity. Things around the resort were mostly business as usual, with one main exception. 

Steve was being _weird_. 

Most of the people at the resort would have no idea. He was still the most conscientious guard, always willing to help staff or guest. He was still a goofball with kids and gave the best piggyback rides. He still hung out with the staff, flirted a bit with Tony, helped Nat out, and spent a lot of his off times on his front porch, watching the world go by. 

What he wasn’t doing was talking. To Bucky or to Tony. He refused to discuss the 4th further, which Tony found odd but Bucky found disturbing. 

_“He’s a digger,” Bucky said._

_“He’s a what now?”_

_The two men were trying to fix a very stubborn AC unit in one of the guest rooms. Bucky kept saying they needed to call an actual HVAC person and Tony kept calling him a coward._

_“Our whole lives, he never lets things lie. He digs at you, makes you talk, gets you with those eyes of truth and a kind word and all of a sudden you’re spilling your guts. This whole ‘we can forget it’ routine is fucking weird.”_

_Tony twisted a wrench. “Maybe he’s turning over a new leaf?”_

_Bucky snorted. “He told me you know about the star and all. Does that sound like a guy who turns over leaves? Because I think it sounds like a stubborn asshole who is just the best fucking guy but still a stubborn asshole.”_

_Tony laughed and they fell into a kind of silence, punctuated by Tony’s mutterings and requests for wrenches of various sizes._

_“I think,” Tony said finally, “that it’s probably fine. I mean, you know him best so if you say this is weird, then I accept it, but he plays his cards pretty close to the vest, Buckaroo. Darcy can’t even really get a read on him and she’s my human psyche whisperer, so I guess the best we can do is just go with it.”_

_Bucky snorted once again, causing Tony to look over at him. “Is that your preferred reaction to my wisdom?”_

_Bucky smirked. “Genius, right? And your best answer is go with it?”_

_“Great with wires & coding, pretty good with money, absolutely shitty with humans.”_

_“Well, there’s your new brand statement.”_

_“It does have a ring of something, doesn’t it?”_

August – as Tony had promised – brought not only the highest volume of guests, but the highest number of entitled ones. The staff started a daily bingo card of who got the worst requests – the bartenders always seemed to win – and Tony made sure Darcy had the budget to get everyone little treats as thank yous for not flat out punching folks. 

August also brought birthdays, which was much better to focus on then assholes. Peter’s was August 10th and Tony’s was the 22nd and both were going to be special. Peter had asked for a day at the Franklin Institute in Philly and had invited nearly everyone from his class and May begged several of the resort folks to help serve as chauffeurs and chaperones. Tony, Steve, Darcy, and Pepper were only too happy to oblige. 

_“I did not peg you as willing to spend an entire day with kids,” Steve said to Tony one evening. They had developed a bit of a pattern; sometime after dinner, they ended up on one porch or another for at least a few minutes. Tony would tinker with code on his tablet, Steve would sketch or just sit and they would chat._

_The entire staff – literally the entire staff down to part-time janitors – had a bet on how long it would take the two idiots to realize they were in love. Nat and Bucky kept reminding everyone that their boys were stubborn as well as idiots, so no one should get their hopes up. Regardless, hopes remained up._

_“A, this is for Peter, b, it’s science and I can’t risk that they’d get some local yocal guide who can’t answer their questions properly, and c, it has air conditioning.”_

_Steve laughed. “So the Franklin Institute crosses the threshold of ‘Things We’ll Do for AirCon’?”_

_“Listen, I’m not saying that it’s more humid right now than a fat man’s sack in Thailand, but it’s gotta be close.”_

_“That is so… graphic, Tony, thank you,” Steve barked out another laugh and Tony was gratified to see the blush creeping up Steve’s ears._ Ah, there it is, Tony gleefully thought to himself as he tucked that image away in his memory banks. Making Steve blush had rocketed to the top of the Tony Stark Kink List. 

_“Here to serve,” Tony remarked glibly and heard Steve mutter something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like ‘put that mouth to better use’ and Tony had to work real hard to control his face._

The plans for Tony’s 30th had been taken completely out of his hands, which Darcy assured Bucky and Steve was for the best. 

_“He rented an actual elephant?” Steve’s jaw dropped._

_“It was before Jarvis was fully functional and so we think it was a 2am drunk dial type of thing, but Nat came in to about seven voicemails about permits for a full circus on the beach and how the township was never going to go for it and while we were sorting that, the elephant showed up.”_

_Bucky and Steve howled as Darcy flipped through pictures and agreed that it was best that Tony no longer planned his own parties._

The resort closed to the public at 3pm that day and all overnight guests were advised that there was a private party on the grounds that they were welcome to join, but that their IDs would be checked and their cell phones confiscated. 

_“We had incidents,” Darcy said simply when Steve quirked his brow at that one. “You can make a pretty penny selling photos of Tony to tabloids, or even to some of his board members because they’re petty assholes who like to blackmail their boss because they’re jealous that he’s so smart and younger than them.”_

_“That feels specific.”_

_“I’m just spitballing.”_

The various VIP guests began to arrive at 4, all of whom were friends with Pepper, or Nat, or both and that left Darcy to make sure all the last-minute details were ready. 

“Steve, can you double check with Sofi that the bar has back up plans for ice? Even if it’s just a specific person assigned to Wawa runs, there is going to come a point where the ice maker can’t keep up,” she pointed her pencil at him as she scanned her clipboard. He saluted and made his way to the bar. 

“Bucky, mmmpph.”

She was cut off with his lips on hers. “Dollface, you gotta breathe. Stark has told you about fourteen times this hour that he’s thrilled with the plans, that he already feels celebrated, and it will all be fine.”

“Do not charm me out of my panic attack, Barnes,” Darcy fake scolded him. “Help me complete the list.”

“I hate the fucking list.”

“Your feelings regarding the list are noted and ignored, now be a good boyfriend and go double check the fence line along the north side? I saw youths loitering.”

“I shall protect you from loitering youths,” Bucky put his hand over his heart like swearing an oath, and then wiggled his eyebrows. “What is the reward for said heroic adventure?”

Darcy rolled her eyes with a grin on her face. “My eternal gratitude and maybe a blow job.”

“I’ll take it.” He kissed her again and wandered off. 

“Lawd above that ass,” she murmured to herself as she grabbed her cell phone and made one final call to the police station to remind them about parking. 

The plan was actually pretty simple. Many ideas had been tossed about – a comic book theme where everyone came as their favorite hero until a few people reminded Darcy that meant spandex in summer and was she really that cruel?; an Italian theme until Pepper reminded them that’s what she did for his 25th; but it was, surprising no one, Steve who came up with the perfect idea. 

_“He loves music,” Steve said calmly over the hubbub of the brainstorming meeting. “Really, besides writing code, tinkering with machines, and bothering Pepper, music is his favorite thing. So why don’t we do something with that?”_

_“Whuddya have in mind?” Darcy asked as Steve let a slow smile spread across his face._

_“Everyone who is coming knows and loves Tony, right? So why don’t we make him a giant mixtape? Everyone brings the song that reminds them of him – or sends it along ahead of time – and then everything is themed on his favorite bands? There can be a listening booth or something for people to hear the songs other people chose, of course there’s a dance floor for him to ignore for hours and then drag everyone out to like he did at Pride, and food can all have song puns.”_

_“That is absolutely perfect,” Pepper said through the speakerphone._

The mixtape idea was inspired and Darcy knew that while Tony would crack a thousand jokes and make fun of some of the people’s choices, he’d be so overwhelmed with love that he’d be in physical pain and that was basically what she was going for. 

When she’d sent out the request for songs to all the partygoers, Darcy had also requested a paragraph explanation as well as their favorite picture of themselves and Tony. May had taken all of it and worked her creative wonders and produced an absolutely gorgeous scrapbook of it all. 

The kitchen had outdone themselves in menu planning and prep, and Darcy laughed when she’d tried to give her head chef the night off, telling him she’d bring in a ringer and the look of horror that passed his face would have shriveled the soul of a lesser mortal. He had agreed to a few extra vacation days as payment, however. 

Bucky, Pepper, Nat, and Steve had assigned themselves as her personal staff that night to execute whatever needed to be done. Bucky and Steve liaised with security and various personnel, while Pepper kept an eye on party goer’s needs and Nat made sure the bar and kitchen were working like clockwork. Tony’s only request was that at 11pm, the five of them stopped working and handed off their responsibilities to someone else. They’d begrudgingly agreed. 

At 11:15, most people had left, a lot of the staff had clocked out, and pretty much all that remained were people Tony considered favorites. He’d herded them into his backyard, where he’d secretly had snacks and chairs laid out and proposed a toast. 

“I have no idea whose idea this was,” he brandished the scrapbook and thumb drive that held the “mixtape”, “but it is, by far, my favorite birthday ever. I’m tipsy enough to be sappy but not drunk enough to not mean this shit, so let me say thank you to all of you. Not everyone gets second chances and still can’t figure out what I did to deserve mine, but if a man is judged by the company he keeps, Christ Almighty I must be a good man. Thanks, everyone.”

Everyone offered ‘cheers’ and ‘love you, Stark’ as he settled back onto the settee he was sharing with Pepper. 

“Steve,” she whispered in his ear. “This was all him.”

Tony blinked a few times and didn’t respond. 

“Tony,” Pepper continued. “Did you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Pep,” Tony replied. “Right, gotta do a thing. Lifeguard Steve! Join me for an evening constitutional?”

Steve’s look of surprised was caught by the light of the tiki poles as he said sure and followed Tony down the path from his house to the beach. They walked in companionable silence for a few seconds – mostly until they were out of earshot – and then Tony stopped and turned to him. 

“Your idea? The music, the tape, the food puns? Your idea?”

Even though Tony couldn’t see the blush, he knew it was there by the way Steve hung his head slightly and rubbed the back of his neck. “Darcy came up with the book and the letters to you.”

“But your idea, the whole thing, the base?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “I’m really glad you liked it.”

“Liked it? Liked it? Steven, I adored it,” Tony enthused. “I mean, some of my friends have appalling taste in music, but I should have guessed that Rhodey would torture me with Earth, Wind, and Fire, so that’s really on me, but I also notice that you don’t have a letter in this book, so I’m wondering when I plug this thing in, what song is going to be from you.”

“Oh, I just picked one,” Steve obsficated. 

“That is a lie, Captain,” Tony said softly, “because I have known you for three months and I don’t think you’ve ever made a random decision in your life. What song?”

Steve was quiet for few beats and then he looked away. “It’s old, like 1920s old, it’s by Gershwin and my ma used to play all these old Broadway records when I was growing up, she probably still does and it is her dream to go to a Broadway play on real Broadway, as she calls it, so I’m saving up to take her, and I am rambling, but this one is the one that ran through my head when I thought of you.” He pulled out his phone, opened iTunes and the strains of “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” started playing. 

The men stood there, bathed in moonlight, as Laura Osnes sang over them. 

_There are many many crazy things_  
_That will keep me loving you_  
_And with your permission _  
_May I list a few_ __

____

_The way you wear your hat_  
_The way you sip your tea_  
_The memory of all that_  
_No, no they can't take that away from me_

_The way your smile just beams_  
_The way you sing off key_  
_The way you haunt my dreams_  
_No, no they can't take that away from me_

_We may never never meet again, on that bumpy road to love_  
_Still I'll always, always keep the memory of_

_The way you hold your knife_  
_The way we danced until three_  
_The way you changed my life_  
_No, no they can't take that away from me_  
_No, they can't take that away from me_

When the final strains of the piano faded, Tony let out a breath. “Well, fuck, Steven.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve breathed. “Doing that now, it sounds a little, overwhelming, I guess, I never meant for you to hear it when I was, and that’s why I didn’t do a note, but-“

His apology was cut off as Tony pressed his lips to Steve. He held them there for a beat, before Steve cracked his lips just enough for Tony to lean in. The kiss was tender, yet hungry, intimate, yet strange, full of promise, yet it felt like coming home. 

It lasted for a few moments before hands started to wander and breaths started to catch and everything was perfect until Steve abruptly stepped back. 

“I can’t, I’m sorry, I just can’t, I’m sorry,” and muttering that over and over, he did an about face and headed down the beach and away from Tony, who was left standing with his mouth gaping and his dick hard. 

“Well, _that_ was not where I thought tonight was going." He ran a hand through his hair and wandered back towards his house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two more chapters for these idiots in love, so we're in the homestretch! 
> 
> Thank you so, so, so much for your incredible comments and the kudos and all. 
> 
> Find me on [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/betheflame1) or [Tumblr](http://betheflame.tumblr.com) for more on these yahoos.


	9. Chapter 9

“How was the meeting with Sam?”

Bucky scrubbed the back of his neck with his good hand and grinned up at Tony. “Said I was cleared for independent living but didn’t believe me you were gonna fit me with a new arm.”

“Well, Sam of little faith. Did you tell him about Penn and everything?”

At the beginning of August, Tony had taken Bucky out to Philadelphia for an afternoon on a secret mission that no one knew about but Steve. 

_“I mean, surprises are a risk,” Steve mused. “He needs schedules, so maybe we add it to his the night before as ‘Tony and Bucky’s Day of Fun’ or something.”_

_Tony raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying I’m Janice?”_

_“I’m saying you’re both from New York and that episode was on last night.”_

_Tony tapped a few buttons on his phone. “Done.”_

Tony had made good on his threat to start ‘messing around in prosthesis’ and had formed a company to provide funding for exciting prototypes out there. The first lab Pepper helped him find was at the University of Pennsylvania in Philly and Bucky had quickly become their first patient for a new, fully articulated, nearly life-like arm. 

“Yeah,” Bucky said, handing Tony the screwdriver he knew the man needed. “It’ll come in handy for the new gig.”

“You tell Steve yet?” Tony asked, saying the name carefully, as he had since his birthday, and which Bucky noticed but said nothing. 

“We’re getting dinner tomorrow and I’ll tell him then,” Bucky replied. “It’s not going to go well.”

“He may surprise you,” Tony said diplomatically. 

Bucky snorted. “You got it bad if you think Steve Rogers can be reasonable.”

Tony said nothing, Bucky said nothing in return, and both men continued to work in silence for a few minutes.

“This is fucking awkward,” Tony started, “but something is bugging me and you’re the only one who, listen, just tell me, oh God-”

“Spit it out, Stark.”

“Has Steve been with anyone since he got back from Iraq?”

“You mean like relationship?”

“I mean on any level that involves his dick,” Tony replied. 

Bucky snorted out a laugh and then said no. 

“No?”

Bucky shook his head. “It’s why all his talk about you got me excited, not in that way, you got a good ass but it’s nothing on Darcy’s,” he rolled his eyes at Tony when the other man winked at him. 

“Whuddya mean, all that talk about me?”

“Oh, the, what does Darcy call it, perving you did on him? 100% returned.”

“Oh reaaaaaalllllyyyy,” Tony dragged out, dropping all tools and pretense that he was doing anything but talking to Bucky. 

“Did Stevie forget to mention that detail?”

“It may have slipped his mind, yes,” Tony said. “But in his defense, I was transparent with my lusting but we’ve never exactly talked about it.”

Bucky flipped the wrench around in his hand a few times. “I don’t know what happened on your birthday, Stark, but even his ma has noticed something’s off. He calls her every single Thursday and Sunday, like clockwork, since he’s been back. Your party was, what, Tuesday? He missed the Thursday call, was late for the Sunday, and to an Irish mother that means her boy has clearly been possessed by the devil, so I got a few calls. 

“I cannot stop playing the tape of what he said on that beach in my head - what I remember of it any way - and if that’s the shit he’s been bottling, that’s the guilt he feels, he’s as fucked up as I am and refusing to see it.”

Tony cocked his head to the side. “So, his is PTSD too?”

Bucky cackled so loudly it startled some children playing nearby. “You find me one fucking human who did what we did and isn’t affected somehow and I’ll show you a sociopath. I mean, different levels, sure, and everyone has their own garbage, but we were stripped of who we were, trained to kill, and then dropped back into who we were before like shoes that don’t fit after they’ve been left out in the rain. It fucks with you, it really does, and Sam’s helped me realize that it should.

“However,” Bucky looked dead at Tony. “Steve hates being fussed over, has hated it our whole lives, since he was a sickly little motherfucker and even now that he can crush us all with his bare hands if he felt like it. He hates being told he’s weak, hates being told he needs help. So, he pretends he doesn’t need it. He helps everyone else, no one helps him. A fucking martyr, that’s my best friend, and good luck to you if you love him, becuase he’s gonna put up a fight.”

Tony blinked a few times. “The sick thing, he mentioned that, how bad was it?”

“He was born with a hole in his heart and under-developed lungs. Had asthma for a long time, but some procedure they did on him when we were 15 fixed it enough to let him enlist. There was a little while where we thought he was going to go deaf when he got yellow fever - shit you not, you can still get that when you have no immune system and there are assholes who don’t get vaccinated around you - but they managed to get him back from that brink.” Bucky shrugged. “He hit a growth spurt when we were 16 and hasn’t really looked back since.”

“Jesus,” Tony swore. 

“Yeah, like I said, you didn’t pick an easy one,” Bucky smiled sadly. “But I’ll tell you this, Stark, he is the best man any of us have ever met, I swear to God, but if you’re going to wrestle his heart into submission, you better not fucking walk away. You’re going to do this, you’re going to do this, or so help me God I will end you.”

Tony met the man’s eyes. “I hurt him anymore than he’s already confused me, you have a deal.”

_____________________________

Steve felt like he’d been hit in the head with a two-by-four, but fought to keep his face frozen with the grin he knew was on it. _Bucky got a job._

“Stark said I could keep living in the staff cottages, and we’d work out a rent once I found out my salary, and there’s also been talk of helping me finance a car, and I know that working for my girlfriend’s dad is a risk, but…” Bucky’s face was split in half with a grin Steve hadn’t seen in ages. “I really think it’s time to try being a human again and this feels right.”

“Of course it is,” Steve forced out, as he took a giant bite of his cheeseburger. “It’s fantastic! I mean, you get a good job, you get to be near Darcy, and Nat will be around to make sure you’re not too much of an idiot.”

“Just sucks you’ll be so far,” Bucky added, finishing his hot dog. “I know once you get going with everything, it’s going to be hard for you to get time, but I have to be up in the city at least twice a month for Sam and for arm shit, so we’ll see each other whenever we can.”

_Whenever we can. We’re going from his entire life structured around my visits to whenever we can._ Steve was quickly losing his grip on his emotions as he finished his dinner quickly. 

“I really am so excited for you, buddy,” Steve stood up and pulled Bucky into a hug. “I’m on Peter duty tonight, so I’m going to go head to the Parkers. See you later.”

_He doesn’t need me he doesn’t need me he doesn’t need me no one needs me no one needs me what purpose do I serve do I even serve one what am I doing he doesn’t need me_

As Steve’s feet took him down the well-rehearsed path to Peter and May’s, his brain kept repeating the mantra that had started when Bucky told him he was moving to the island full time, that Darcy’s dad had found Bucky a maintenance job with the township, and that Sam had already approved the move.

As he walked, he passed Tony’s cabin, and heard Pepper on the phone. He heard his name and Tony’s and paused his walk. 

_“I mean, if Steve’s just a flavor of the month, then… I know Louise, I just… Tony’s never been cautious though…”_

Well, that did it. Bucky didn’t need him. He was just Tony’s flavor of the month. He quickly wiped his eyes and hurried up. He had some packing to do after May got home.

_____________________________

“Are you going to be at the big party tomorrow, Mr. Steve?” Peter asked as the pair raced in Mario Kart.

“No, buddy,” Steve said, keeping the tenor of his voice as even as possible. “I have a meeting for one of my classes tomorrow so I’m leaving in the morning." 

“Oh,” the young boy was crestfallen. “It’s the only party of the year I’m allowed to be at the whole thing! I was hoping you’d be there.”

“I’m sorry, Petey,” Steve replied. “But with Bucky living down here now, I’m sure I’ll see you before next season.”

“You promise?”

“Sure, kid, I promise.”

The rest of the evening went on as normal, Steve letting Peter’s enthusiasm carry him, ignoring every time the kid mentioned Tony. Before either of them knew it, May was walking through the door and Steve was on his way. 

As he rounded the slight curve in the path, he stifled a groan. Tony was on his porch. 

“Lifeguard Steve, you’ve been avoiding me,” Tony said in a light tone that betrayed the words. Steve knew he deserved the ambush, he just didn’t want it. 

“End of the season is busier than I thought,” Steve said calmly, taking a seat in the chair next to Tony as they had done so many nights throughout the summer. 

Tony snorted. “If we’re going to play that way… How’s your season been, Mr. Rogers? I’m doing an informal staff survey.”

“Are you?” 

Tony nodded and turned his body towards the other man. “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our resort to other potential employees?”

“Well, the co-workers are nosy, the guests are kind of a pain, but the boss is pretty hot, so I’d go with an 8.”

_Jesus Christ, he’s flirting with me after…_ “Thank you for your feedback. On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to return for employment next season?”

“Well,” Steve took a deep breath. “My buddy and his girl are down here all year round, so it would probably just save on gas if I came back.”

Tony’s patience - which was thin on a good day and tissue paper today - finally snapped. “Only your buddy and his girl?”

Steve didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “Well, no, I mean, not only.”

Tony took a few deep breaths. “You know what, fuck it, what the hell is going on between us?”

Steve blinked a few times. “Come again?”

Tony shook his head in shock, “Is that confusing?”

“I’ve enjoyed getting to know you this summer, Tony,” Steve began. “But we live really different lives, so it’s probably best that it didn’t go any further or -”

Tony cut him off. “Are you actually joking me right now. Do you think I give a fuck about how different our lives are? I don’t even know what that means! My life is different than everyone’s, it’s why I’m a billionaire, but that didn’t seem to matter last week when you were -”

Now it was Steve’s turn to cut Tony off. “Your birthday, that night, the beach, that was a mistake. I lost my head a bit and it won’t happen again.”

“It won’t - I’m so fucking confused,” Tony replied. “You planned the greatest birthday I’ve ever had, you gave me the most romantic fucking song I’ve ever, and now? Now the kiss that you broke off when it was going somewhere truly fucking magical, yes, I said magical, is something that won’t happen again?!” By the end of the question, Tony’s voice was rage whispering. 

Steve’s face froze in a cold expression that Tony had never seen before. “I’m not interested, Tony. I don’t do flings, I don’t do bedpost notches or flavors of the month, and I should have told you that up front. That’s on me and I’m sorry. I thought you knew it was just flirting. Now, I’ve got some packing to do, so if you’ll excuse me.”

He abruptly stood up and walked into the house, leaving a completely stunned Tony frozen to his chair. He had never been more confused in his life, and that included when he woke up in that cave, and he had no idea what his play should be. That conversation felt like it had been with three different people, and only one of them closely resembled the man he had started to fall for. 

Shaking himself out of the haze, Tony walked back to the house he shared with Pepper. _Flavor of the month, flavor of the month, that’s a really, really specific phrase for him to just…_

“Pep?” He called cautiously as he walked into the house. “Are you still here?”

“Yup,” she walked into the front room and caught the look on his face. “What’s going on?”

“I think,” Tony swallowed, and felt the tears sting for the first time, “I think Steve just dumped me? But we weren’t dating? So he just… told me it was all in my head?”

“What the fuck?” 

One of the many things that Tony loved about Pepper was that she went from zero to sixty in terms of rage when someone hurt him. “I remain as confused as you are, Pep.”

She blinked a few times. “You are not going to let me fix this or hurt him-” Tony shook his head “and we still technically have a season to close down, so,” she cast her eyes towards the kitchen. “I have to clean my rage away until you are ready for me to do something else.”

He chuckled as she gave him a quick embrace and a kiss on the forehead. “I don’t deserve you, Pep,” he said softly. 

He knew he must look completely heartbroken when she replied with candor instead of sarcasm. “Oh, Anthony, it is us who don’t deserve you.”

_____________________________

“HE FUCKING WHAT!” Bucky raged at Darcy.

“He left,” she replied, “a note.”

When Darcy had headed over to Steve and Bucky’s bungalow earlier in the day to ask Steve if he could help her with setting up for the End of Season staff party, she’d found his car gone. He hadn’t been answering his phone for most of the day, and so she was officially concerned. Poking around inside, she discovered his room cleaned out of his possessions and a note addressed to her sitting on his bed. 

_Darcy -_

_Thanks for a really, really great summer. I got a notice from school that I have a pre-class meeting today for my senior art project, so I had to head back to the city. I’m sorry to miss the party, truly, but I’ll see you the next time I’m back down to visit Bucky. I filled out the paperwork to be considered for next season, so we can talk about that, too._

_Take care of him, will ya? He’s stupid, but he’s also the best._

_Steve_

Bucky read the note with an absolute incredulous look on his face. “What the ever living fuck is that jackass thinking.”

“Oh, God I hoped you knew,” Darcy replied. “Because we are all confused as fuck.”

“Who is ‘we all’?”

“So, while you and I were out last night, Steve told Tony they weren’t anything special.”

Bucky blinked a few times at Darcy and then shook his head. “I’m sorry, I thought you said that Steve broke up with Tony before they started dating.”

“That is exactly what I said, babe, and Nat and Pepper spent the night holding Tony together and now we’re all really hoping you could be the Wounded Warrior Whisperer and tell us what the fuck happened.”

Bucky ran his hand over his mouth, “My best guess? This is his version of going comatose in a museum.”

“You’ll need to unpack that for me,” Darcy said. 

“Steve likes to pretend that he’s fine, but we all saw that he’s not, and because he is the most stubborn motherfucker that I love with all my heart, he’s humpty dumpty off the wall, I think, doll, because he simply will not ask for help. Like when I shut down in the museum earlier in the summer? He’s done his version of that, but he’s going to pretend he’s fine,” Bucky paced around Darcy’s small office while he made his speech. 

“So what do we do?”

Bucky smiled sadly. “Imma give him a breath to realize he’s being a self-destructive asshat, and then I’ll go kick his ass and in the meantime, you ladies have to keep Tony in his tree.”


	10. Chapter 10

Steve may be an idiot, but he’s not completely stupid. He knew the reason he couldn’t get any of his works to work was that he still missed Tony. He’d visited Bucky twice since school started - once to deliver a box of Federal Donuts to Darcy who claimed she’d never had them and that was sacrilege and once just to say hi - and had managed to avoid seeing Tony, but… 

He’d set up a Google Alert for the man, so he knew he wasn’t getting over him any time soon. 

Steve had never been a guy who created art out of his pain, not really. He created art to show the world how he saw it, the tiny details most people overlooked. He sketched the waiting rooms he’d been in as a child, the detail on the hospital beds he could never seem to get out of, the hands of the nurses who kept him alive. He painted soaring sunsets that highlighted the shadows where most people lived their lives, and had tried his hand at sculpting a time or two. Bucky had always said his hands were meant to create worlds and he’d never really understood what that meant until he met Tony and felt the same way about his. 

The last weekend in September, he found himself driving up the New Jersey Turnpike towards his mother’s house and braced himself for a loving, but completely intrusive, onslaught of questioning. 

They sat at the small kitchen table he used to fit easily behind, but now can never find anywhere to put his legs. She made him a “proper Sunday lunch”, which always included three types of potatoes, and regaled him with neighborhood gossip as they ate. He forced himself to participate in the routine, asking questions where he was supposed to and making noises of judgement or appreciation as necessary. He agreed with his mother that the O'Daugherty's across the way were getting notions - the ultimate Irish sin - about themselves with their new car and told her a few stories from the first weeks of class. 

The tea was being poured when she pulled out the big guns. “I was chatting to Winnifred this week and she said she really likes this girl Bucky’s got.”

“I told you that Darcy is really good for him,” Steve responded. 

“I guess they were up in the city with that fella Tony you were always going on about this summer and the three of them came and took all the Barnes’ out to dinner,” Sarah said calmly, but Steve knew better. 

“They were probably doing stuff for Bucky’s new arm,” Steve was not going to give his mother an inch. 

“Hm hmmm,” Sarah responded and sipped her tea. 

Steve should have known better than to enter into battle with an Irish mammy digging for information about their child’s love life. 

“I haven’t seen Tony since I left Barnegat, Ma, I told you that,” Steve finally said. “I’m sure I’ll see him at some point, he was a good friend and I had a good time with him this summer, but you know what summer is like and now I’m in school and I gotta focus.”

“Hmm hmmmm,” Sarah replied, once again taking a sip of her tea. 

“Don’t do that, Ma,” Steve warned. “You’re digging where there’s nothing.”

“I’m just surprised, that’s all,” Sarah said in her most passive aggressive tone, which had been deployed on Steve more than once, “we have all these ways of talking these days and you chose not to use a one of them on the man I heard more about this summer than I heard about yourself. It’s not like when we first came over and they were lucky to get news from home once a week and that was usually through the calls down to the shop and yet they had more respect for relationships than you seem to, Steven Grant.”

 _Oh, Jesus, the middle name. She had something up her sleeve_. “Tony’s a really busy man, Ma, and I don’t want to bother him.”

Sarah made a scoffing sound that told him he’d lost this round. “Come off it, son. I know love when I see it and you fell for that man. Bucky and his Darcy told me you two were -”

“Bucky and Darcy were here?”

Sarah blinked at him. “They called round like proper people, yes, Bucky wanted to show me his arm and introduce me to her and we had some tea and I made that shortbread you like, the one with the caramel, and told me all sorts of interesting things about the summer.”

“Ma, you know Bucky-”

“I know that Bucky loves you like he loves himself, no more than that, so if Bucky is telling me you're being a blind eejit, then I’m going to believe him. This Tony, for all his flash and cash, sounds like a lovely fella, and someone who just might be worthy of my Steven, and if my James says he is, then that’s that, so let’s stop with this nonsense.”

She sat back and crossed her arms, and Steve sighed in defeat. “He is a really lovely fella,” he grinned wryly at her, using just a touch of his ma’s persistent County Antrim accent, “but I’m really not looking for a relationship.”

“Why the feck not?”

He gaped at his mother’s profanity. “Language, Mother.”

“I will use the words I want to use when my son is being insufferable,” she scoffed. “I have no idea what cockamamie story you have concocted in your head about who you are and what you deserve, but I know you’ve been an extra stubborn one since you came back from over there. You’ve been taking care of Bucky for so long, like a good brother, but it seems like you can take a breath from that, pet, and focus on you. He’s in a good place, it seems, and so I think you get to focus on what could make you happy for a bit.”

“I am, Ma,” Steve stressed. “Art makes me happy, school makes me happy, I am focusing on those things.”

Sarah was silent for a few minutes, which was never a good sign. “Steven, wherever you got the idea that putting yourself first every once and a while is… You have always been the best boy, even when you were a scrappy eejit getting into fights you couldn’t win and ruining all your best clothes, you have never not made me proud to be your ma. Ever. But the flip side of trying to save the world all the time is that you forget you’re worth saving, too. I’m worried you forget that, that you’ll keep settling for “enough”, happy enough, good enough, and you’ll forget that you’re allowed to chase 'best'. 

“You know,” she continued. “Ma and Da didn’t just move over here to get away from the Troubles. They moved because they knew if they stayed there, in their wee village on the coast of Antrim, they could predict all of our lives generations out. Don’t get me wrong, they loved being Irish and they were proud to be, and they missed home so much sometimes they could taste it, and they raised us as Irish as you could over here, but Ma used to talk about how everyone she knew was living the life they knew they’d live since they were weeuns. They got married to people from down the way and settled close to their mammies to raise their weeuns and on and on the cycle went. A lot of them were happy, truly and completely, but some? Some she knew had settled for 'enough'. 

“And when she met Da, and they were both dreamers, they knew they had to give us all the opportunity for ‘best’. So when Paul was ready to get into primary school, they started applying for all the jobs in New York that they could find. Everyone told them they’d be back, that this American adventure would be only a few years, but Ma and Da knew better. They knew that once they could give us hope of more, they were never turning back and they worked their fingers to the bone my whole life to remind me that I never ever had to settle for enough. I deserved happy and best and right and all the other things. I had that with your father, and I have that with you, and I refuse to let you settle for ‘enough’ when you have ‘best’ right within your grasp.”

She leaned forward and grabbed his face in her hands, the way she had his whole life when she was saying something she needed his soul to hear. “Steven, I think this man might be your best. He may not be, he may turn out to be someone who breaks your heart into fourteen thousand pieces, but he may just be your happily ever after and if you walk away without seeing which one it is, without really truly giving it a shot, you are spitting on the graves of all our people who worked to give you a shot of a life beyond their wildest dreams.”

 _Ah, there it was_ , Steve thought, fighting to keep the grin off his face, _the perfect combination of invoking dead Irish relatives and rousing speech_. 

“Now, finish your tea, and then I need you to help me fix the washing line, it keeps coming loose from the plaster.”

“Ma, you know you don’t need a washing line,” Steve replied, as they entered into the argument they must have had four thousand times. “They make these things called tumble dryers now.”

“Don’t sass your mother,” Sarah swatted at Steve. “I’m one wee woman, I don’t have a lot to wash and the clothes just smell better when they’re hung on the line! Now, climb up on that ladder and fix my line, you mucker.”

“Yes, Ma,” he grinned and kissed her cheek, mulling her words as he went.

_____________________________

True to his word to Darcy, Bucky gave Steve one month to fix things with Tony.

“Called, texted, anything?” Bucky asked the man. 

Tony’s face had the same pinched expression it bore since Steve left that fucking note. “No.”

“Right, I have some ass to kick.”

“It’s fine, Bucky,” Tony protested. “He made his choice.”

“He didn’t, though,” Bucky said. “He made a choice based on false intel. That ‘flavor of the month’ puzzle we’ve been trying to solve? Jarvis figured that one out - Pepper had been talking to that Louise lady about how worried she was about you falling for Steve so fast, that this was against usual protocol and that she wouldn’t had been worried if he was just one of your flavors of the month, but you were dreaming about futures with him and she was worried. Steve must have overheard her.”

“Well, great,” Tony responded. “He still made a choice.”

“So do you want me to give him the chance to make a different one or not?”

Tony blinked rapidly to fight the tears gathering in his eyes. “I miss him, James.”

“And you deserve to hear him say that he does too, so I’ll head to Philly as soon as I’m off shift tomorrow.”

By the time Steve got back class the day after he went to see his mom, he found Bucky waiting in his living room. 

“Well, hello, thanks for letting me know you were coming,” Steve said. 

“Explain,” Bucky stated as he put his feet up on Steve’s coffee table.

“Explain what,” Steve said, putting his bag down and throwing his keys in their normal spot.

“Explain why the _living fuck_ you are running from the best thing that could happen to you,” Bucky responded.

Steve rolled his eyes. “I was just one of Tony’s flavors of the month, I heard Pepper loud and clear. I’m not into working at Baskin Robbins while I’m trying to finish school.”

Bucky snorted inelegantly. “You’re a fucking embarrassment and not just because of that joke. That man is obsessed with you, and Pepper didn’t tell you fuck all, you overheard Tony’s functional sister tell her friend that she was worried about him. Then you played like the housekeeper in _White Christmas_ – don’t give me that look, I watch the whole fucking thing every year with you and your mom – and made a bunch of assumptions and fucked everything up.”

“Buck-“

“No, you have spent years lecturing me and now I got some shit to say,” Bucky said, leaning forward. “Support groups, individual therapy, all of it, I’ve met every emotional issue a human could have and I’m thinking if I looked ‘self-sabotage’ up in the dictionary, it would have your mug next to it.”

“Bucky, this bonding session is –“

“Not done, punk,” Bucky growled. “I’m saying what I want to say, I’ll never say it again, and then we’re going down to Evil Genius because I promised Darcy and Nat pumpkin beer. Now, I have thought a lot about this so listen up. 

“You dragged me two miles. Two goddamn miles through what I can only believe was a hellmouth to make sure I’d have a second chance at life. You fought for me or with me for years, YEARS, Steven, to get me to the place where I could take tentative steps on my own, where I could possibly trust my own instincts or the reality I perceive around me. My family is great, and I love your ma, but you and me, buddy we’re it. We are the foundations of each other’s lives and so I can say this on full authority that you absolutely 100% belong with Tony Stark. 

“He makes you make sense in a way that I’ve never seen before, he grounds you, he makes you honest with yourself and Jesus H, Steven, he makes you laugh. He sees you and I mean he really sees you, he sees the you that the other fellas in the squad never saw because you wouldn’t let them. He somehow has pierced your bullshit and loved you anyway and God, Steve, if you throw that away because of some bullshit, cowardly feeling disguised as bravery, well, then I don’t even want to know you.”

Steve blinked at him. “Are you quite done?”

“Are you going to fix your shit?”

Steve looked everywhere else in the apartment but Bucky for several minutes. Whenever he did look back, Bucky’s eyes were boring into him. 

“I’m not the guy you think I am,” Steve said quietly. 

“No, no, NO, we are not doing this,” Bucky said emphatically. “You are EXACTLY who I know you are. The voice in your head that says you are worth this? That voice is a liar. I’m going to guess it sounds like someone from the old country or whatever the fuck, because your Irish stubbornness comes honestly, but look at me, Steve, look at me.”

Steve did and Bucky continued. “You are wonderful. You are basically part of my soul for fucks sake and I have been through lots and lots and lots of therapy to be able to comfortably say that I am grateful you dragged me out of Iraq and not guilty that I made you do it.”

“You didn’t make -”

“See, that voice in my head was a liar. The voice in your head that says you don’t deserve love because you made hard decisions once, the voice that says having people take care of you means you’re weak, that voice is also a fucking liar,” Bucky said logically. “So, you have a choice. You either believe both of our voices or you believe neither. Your move, Cap. Now, we’re going to get beer and maybe some perogies because I could go for fried potatoes, and then you are going to fix your shit. Grab your coat.”

_____________________________

Bucky didn’t hear from Steve for a few days after he left Philly - he didn’t expect to. He’d told everyone that Steve had to think strategically through all the points that Bucky made and would have to come up with a plan before he responded. So, when day three dawned with a text from the man himself, he wasn’t surprised.

_Steve: Tony’s still doing that thing at Wharton, right?_

_Bucky: Yeah._

_Steve: Can Pepper get me the schedule?_

He laughed out loud and poked Darcy awake to show her the text. She squinted and replied _oh thank fuck_ before rolling back over and huffing her way back to sleep. 

_Bucky: I know it’s a seminar on Monday nights at 6. I’ll get you the rest by the end of the day._

_Bucky: You gonna be brave or stupid?_

_Steve: Those aren’t mutually exclusive._

_Bucky: Go get your boy, Cap._

_____________________________

_Steve: You can’t be my therapist, right?_

Sam checked his phone about four times before fully registering the text he was reading. 

_Steve: Conflict of interest or something? Since we’re friends?_

_Steve: But do I qualify for VA therapy anyway?_

_Sam: You absolutely qualify, and I’ll find you someone perfect._

_Steve: How quickly can they see me?_

_Sam: I’m not sure, are you safe right now?_

_Steve: Shit, no, nothing like that, it’s just that Monday night I’m going to do something stupid and I’ll need to see someone quick if it goes pear shaped._

Sam grinned to himself and flipped back to his chat with Bucky. 

_Sam: He’s going for it._

_Bucky: Thank fucking Christ._

_____________________________

Tony believed firmly that when he’d told the dean at Wharton School of Business he’d organize a seminar series on social entrepreneurship in the 21st century that he’d been very, very drunk. However, his signature was on a contract, and so there he was, seminaring.

He’d spent the summer calling in favors from friends (and a few frenemies) and decided to turn the whole thing into a Shark Tank-esque experiment. There were 50 MBA students signed up for the class, but the Monday night lectures were open to the public. He had lined up some of the most creative and controversial figures in the S.E. world to cover a range of topics. For their final grade, the registered students had two options. One, they could write an in-depth critique of a current S.E. scheme or two, they could propose their own to a panel of investors. That idea had been Steve’s. 

The first Monday in October, therefore, found him in Philly, grateful that Steve didn’t live in the University City neighborhood where Penn was, and setting up for his turn as the public lecturer. His talk was basically his personal story - sans several elements - about taking SI from profiteering hedge fund into more strategic and sustainable solutions. 

As the crowd filed in, he did his normal introductions and reminders that this was first and foremost a class and so his students always had first crack at the questions at the end, but that the public was welcome to ask any if there was time. He launched into the talk, showed some video clips, explained his philosophy of technology, and cracked jokes. 

“Okay, if the students are done with their questions,” he looked over at his TA, who nodded, “we can open the floor. We have about fifteen minutes. So tell me your name, where you’re from, and what you think our biggest global problem is and yes, you gotta narrow it to one. We have a student roving with a mike, so just shoot up your hand and we’ll come to you. Yes, hi,” he smiled at a nervous looking young woman. 

“Hi Mr. Stark, I’m Maddie Sullivan and I’m a senior at Rutgers studying Urban Planning, and I think our biggest issue right now is a lack of sustainable public transportation. My question is about that, actually. Do you see any of your colleagues in S.E. looking at infrastructure?”

“Maddie, hi, call me Tony, and that is a great question,” he smiled warmly and explained a bit about what he knew, gave her some names to Google and they moved on to the next question, which was from a gentleman who worked at Bristol Myers Squibb across the river and was interested in vaccine distribution. It went on like this for a bit longer before Tony called for last question. He checked his phone briefly to shoot Pepper a text that he was almost done, when the voice out of the mike froze him completely. 

“Hi, Mr. Stark, I’m Steve Rogers, I’m a final year student in visual arts at the University of the Arts here in the city and I’m a retired Army officer. I’m interested in the use of art for therapeutic purposes for returning vets, but I also have a real concern for ocean conservation and I know you own a beach resort on Long Beach Island. Could you talk about your conservation measures down there?”

Tony looked up and met Steve’s eyes, which were watering slightly, but his voice was strong. Tony had no idea what the other man’s play was, but the fact that he publicly claimed his Army status was not something Tony missed. “Well, Steve,” he started, “I had a really great lifeguard this past summer who taught us all a lot about it. I can’t really take credit.”

“That’s, well, that’s great to hear they were such a good influence. Are you going to wait until next summer-”

Tony’s TA tried to cut Steve off. “Sorry sir, it’s only one question.”

“Nope, he’s fine, Brian, thanks,” Tony smiled quickly. “Go on.”

Steve was blushing all the way up his ears, but his eyes met Tony’s firmly. “Are you going to wait until next season to implement any more changes or are you thinking of working over the off-season?”

“Well,” Tony said calmly, noticing that people were shifting in their seats and beginning to whisper. Several phones were poised as though filming. “I had been told he wasn’t interested in helping between seasons, so all advancement in that area is on hold.”

“And if he changed his mind? If he realized he was being a stubborn coward and his best friend had told him to pull his head out of his ass before he lost the best thing that had ever happened to him, would there a way to re-start the project?”

Tony bit his lip to keep from grinning, “Yes, Mr. Rogers, I believe there would.”

Steve grinned and Tony could see tears, even from this distance, “Well, that is fantastic news. The oceans deserve it.”

Tony started laughing along with the rest of the crowd, most of whom had obviously seen _Notting Hill_ and had put two and two together. “Okay, Hugh Grant, get down here. Class dismissed.”

Steve grinned and bounded down the steps of the lecture theater and straight into Tony’s arms as the crowd partially dispersed and partially kept watching the pair. 

“I’m so -” Steve began, but Tony put a finger on his lips. 

“We’ll rehash and settle and all later, but right now, I need to kiss you-”

“Oh thank fuck,” Steve breathed and sealed his lips over Tony’s to cheers from the crowd. 

_______________________________

“You’ve met my mother,” Steve said calmly to Tony, who was having a slight panic attack for unknown reasons in the driver’s seat. “You’ve been to her house. You have eaten her food and she loves you. I cannot understand this panic, Tony.”

“It’s Christmas!” Tony sighed, exasperated with his boyfriend. “It’s our first Christmas together, it’s the first Christmas I’ve been in a mother’s house in a long fucking time and I’m nervous, okay? I’m nervous.”

Steve bit back a grin. “Tony, Ma fucking adores you. As soon as you told her you didn’t do Feast of the Seven Fishes, she loved you even more. Now breathe.”

The last few months had been good for the pair. Hard at times, but good. After the night that Steve showed up at Penn, they had a lot to negotiate and that was even before Steve started therapy. 

_“I’m not, I’m sorry, you’re wonderful and I think I may love you, but I’m not living here,” Tony gestured around Steve’s Fishtown studio in the middle of October. “I’m just not.”_

_“I’m not asking you to live here, you elitist jackass, I’m saying I’m not moving to a penthouse in Society Hill, so I’m just asking you to sleep here every once and a damn while,” Steve replied._

_They went round and round a few more times before Steve acknowledged that asking Tony to sleep among the smell of turpentine and tempera paint was probably a bridge too far and Tony admitted that he was maybe being an elitist jackass and accepted that counter tops didn’t need to be marble to be good._

_Finally, they settled on a compromise. Steve would keep his apartment to use as a studio, since his senior portfolio would require some space to put together, and Tony would find his own apartment in one of four designated Philly neighborhoods they both felt comfortable living in. Once Steve graduated, they’d both clearly be back at the shore, and then they’d re-evaluate again._

Sam had indeed found Steve a therapist, a fellow Army vet named Kyle, and Steve was getting more and more used to the process. 

_“He thinks,” Steve said haltingly one evening in November as he entered the apartment. “He thinks he wants you to come next time.”_

_As much as humanly possible, Tony made sure to be in Philly on the days that Steve had therapy. There were times it just left him raw, as good but hard conversations often did, and Tony preferred to be in person for support if he could._

_“Sure, just, let me,” Tony clicked a few buttons as Steve continued to pace, “there’s the link to my private schedule so put it down whenever.”_

_“Just like that?”_

_Tony blinked and looked up at Steve. “Yes, Steven. When I told you that I loved you and that I’d be part of this journey however you want or need me to be, I was serious. What is your brain telling you right now?”_

_That was the question Sam had taught them to ask Bucky and Tony had started using it on Steve as well in these kind of situations._

_“My brain,” Steve said slowly, as though finding the words, “is telling me this is a lot to ask of you when we haven’t been together for very long.”_

_Tony nodded. “Well, I get to decide what is or is not too much for me, right?”_

_“Right.”_

_“So this isn’t too much.”_

_“Are you sure?” For some reason Steve couldn’t quite put his finger on, Tony’s casual acceptance of this was breaking him open._

_“Steven,” Tony put down his tablet and created space on the couch. Opening his arms, he whispered, “Come here, my handsome love.”_

_Steve near collapsed onto the couch and snuggled into Tony’s side as his boyfriend’s arms slipped around him and they rearranged themselves to where Steve got to be the little spoon for a bit on their oversized couch._

_They were quiet for a few minutes, the silence punctuated by Steve’s halting breaths as he tried not to cry. Finally, Tony spoke._

_“Steve, years of therapy have taught me some actually helpful things and one of them is that anything in your head that tells you that you are unlovable or that I am lying about loving you, that voice is the liar. You are right that this is still kind of new, but I’m not a child and I am over playing games or casual flings. This thing, I’m in, I’m in until we both decide we’re not, and I am a stubborn jackass on par with you, so you’re not chasing me off with some lie you’ve made up in your head. So, hear me, and hear me now, I love you and you are worth all of this to me. Okay?”_

_“Okay,” Steve whispered. “I love you, too.”_

_Tony kissed the top of Steve’s head and held the silence for a few seconds. “Now, I’m fucking starving and got pretty bored before you came back, so feed me and blow me please in whatever order you choose.”_

_Steve cracked up laughing as he wiped the last of his tears, already feeling the raw bits of his soul calm. “I choose b then a,” he replied as he flipped himself and Tony into appropriate positions._

“Did you hear from Bucky today?” Tony asked as Steve flipped through Spotify to find appropriate Christmas driving music. 

Steve nodded. “I think it’s the right call for him to do Christmas with the Lewis’ this year.”

“Yeah?”

“The difference is good. Like, he knows them, they’re part of this new life he’s building and last Christmas was a total shit show.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” Tony murmured as he changed lanes. 

“The chaos, I think,” Steve hit play on the She & Him album. “I mean, between his sisters and various cousins and friends that Winnie always invites round, they usually have thirty or forty people cycle through on the day.”

“Holy fuck that is too many people.”

Steve laughed. “Bucky used to love it. He’d schmooze and charm and be the perfect host. After Dad died, Ma and I would go over and just man the kitchen and stay out of everyone’s way. After dinner, Bucky would follow us back to our house and we’d watch movies and revel in the quiet. After the war…”

“Yeah, I can imagine. Did he say how he was doing so far?”

“He is real nervous about his gift to Darcy,” Steve confessed, chuckling.

Tony grinned sheepishly. “I meddled.”

“No,” Steve said in mock outrage. “My only recently employed best friend could totally afford tickets to the first Phillies/Mets game of the year in a luxury box.”

“We also may be crashing,” Tony said. 

“We?”

“Yeah, you, me, Peter, Nat, Pep.”

“We’re crashing their date?”

“I bought the box.”

“But it’s their date.”

“I’m going to make it up to them.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Do you think she’ll like a few days in Clearwater?”

Steve paused for a few beats. “Are you sending her to fucking spring training?”

Tony nodded. “Well, both of them. Alone. If Barnes is ready. If not, then we’ll all go.”

One of the current debates between Sam and Bucky was whether or not Bucky was ready to be back on a plane, which he had not been since his highly-medicated flight home from Germany. There was also some debate about sleeping in new places, say a hotel, since he still had trouble sleeping over at Darcy’s house. Tony pointed out that this was one of the benefits he could provide - a permanent back-up plan. Jets could be available at a moment’s notice, he and Steve could travel adjacent to Bucky and Darcy, always ready for support. 

And so, as with all things in their lives, they moved forward simultaneously haltingly and with gusto. 

Steve and Tony drove on in companionable silence, Tony muttering more about seeing Sarah and Steve commenting on various things he saw as he scrolled Twitter, until they finally pulled in front of Sarah’s house just as the sun was setting. 

As usual, the woman was overjoyed to see them and immediately ushered them into the kitchen for tea and coffee and gossip. 

_“You drink tea,” Tony had remarked mischievously on his first visit to Sarah’s._

_“Only Barry’s and only at Ma’s,” Steve replied, not looking at Tony._

_“You drink tea,” this time it came out in a horrible Irish accent and Sarah had smacked the back of Tony’s head._

_“Yes, he drinks tea like a proper Irishman, now if you don’t behave yourself, I’ll take away the coffee.”_

_“Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Rogers, ma’am,” Tony sat up straight and held his cup tighter to his person as Sarah and Steve laughed._

When it was time for presents, Tony was nervously biting his cuticles and Steve was telling him to calm down. 

“What is the fuss, Anthony?” Sarah asked kindly. 

“He’s afraid you won’t like his gift,” Steve replied. 

“Impossible,” Sarah responded. “Did you pick it out for me?”

“Yeah,” Tony replied. 

“Then I shall love it,” Sarah said matter-of-factly. “But just to confirm, hand it here.”

Tony handed Sarah a large, unruly box, wrapped a bit sloppily. “I’m terrible at wrapping,” he apologized as Sarah tsked and the two men saw the sheen of tears in her eyes when she opened the box. 

After nearly a month of searching, Tony had found a weaver not far from Sarah’s home town who did custom works and commissioned a shawl for her in blue, yellow, and grey, her favorite color combination, out of Irish wool and American cotton. The names of her family - cousins, siblings, everyone - were embroidered around the edges, which Tony explained was to help her use her family to keep her warm, and she looked at him with warm eyes and pointed to a blank spot, _so, I get to embroider Anthony Edward myself, then?_

Sarah had gotten Steve a new set of brushes to use in school and Tony a few Italian cookbooks since he kept threatening to learn how to cook with all the time he “wasted” in Philly while Steve painted things. Steve gave Sarah his traditional gift, a piece of art he’d created for her. This year it was a painting of the last family photo they’d had before his dad had died, framed in a copper frame that Tony and Peter had created together. 

They did a video call with Bucky and Darcy, watched White Christmas per tradition, and spent a quiet night in the light of the tree. Around midnight, Steve had dozed off with his head propped on Tony’s lap and Tony was telling Sarah about how amazed he was at Steve’s ability to create art. 

“Anthony,” Sarah said quietly. She only ever called him that, and he wasn’t sure why but it felt… right. “Why on God’s green earth did you think I wouldn’t like your gift?”

He squirmed a little. “I don’t have a lot of experience in getting gifts for momish people.”

Sarah bit her lip to keep a small grin at bay. “Momish people?”

“Yeah, I mean, my Ma died a while back and all she ever really wanted was time with me and a bottle of perfume, and I don’t have aunts or grandmas or anyone else, but you’re Steve’s Ma, and I wanted to give you something that would let you know what that means to me, how much I love him and how much I know he means to you, and, yeah, I’m just glad you like it.”

“Anthony, can I tell you something that’s going to make you deeply uncomfortable but I don’t care?”

“Well, with an opening like that.”

She laughed softly. “My Steven is my world, you know that. We tried to give him siblings, but my body just, anyway. It’s been him and me for a long time and the Barnes’ are family, and Bucky’s my son, but it’s still just him and me.

“I know he’s dated, I’m not as old fashioned as he thinks I am. But I also knew that the first boy he brought home to me would be special. I had no idea just how, though. I could not have dreamed up someone better for my boy, Anthony, so thank you for loving him so well,” she got up from her chair and kissed his forehead. 

“So, from your momish person and his Ma, Merry Christmas. I’ll see ya in the morning.”

_______________________________

Tony knew as soon as the door opened that Steve had a bad day. They were inching closer and closer to the day Steve would have to submit his final portfolio and Tony had come to understand the ‘temperamental artist’ stereotype was a real thing. 

There was the day that Steve tried to light four of his paintings on fire and then the time he came home from a class covered head to toe in purple dye and told Tony not to ask. Or the time Tony asked, in what he had thought was an innocent voice, to see what Steve was working on and Steve started bellowing about not putting pressure on him. 

Graduation could not come soon enough. 

“Heard from Darcy,” Steve opened with as he toed his shoes off and threw his keys on the side table. 

“Yeah?”

“Bucky’s been bad for a few days.”

 _Oh shit_. “Bad?”

Steve nodded and collapsed onto the couch, putting his head in Tony’s lap. “Can’t get out of bed bad.”

“Do we need to go down there?”

“No, see that’s the thing,” Steve said. “She decided to not call me until he got out of bed, and he did that this morning, so she was just calling to let me know she’d handled it.”

 _Well, okay_. “So, just a FYI situation?”

Steve nodded. “Tell me he still needs me.”

“Oh baby, of course he still needs you. He just has a Darcy now and you don’t have to be the only one who carries Buckaroo when he’s tired. Do you trust me?”

“I trust you.”

“Good, then let’s talk to some food about our feelings because the new season of Queer Eye just dropped on Netflix,” Tony replied. 

“Thai?”

“I love you.”

“Back at you.”

_____________________________

“Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Barnegat Beach Resort,” Tony boomed to the room full of seasonal employees. “I’m Tony Stark, but I’m guessing most of you know that, and I own the joint, but I’m in charge of basically nothing. Welcome back to all of you who are family already and hello to the newly inducted. I’m going to run through some basics for the new kids on the block, inserting _Hanging Tough_ reference here,” he looked up at blank faces. “Oh, jeeeeesus you are all fetuses I forgot, you see -”

“TONY,” Steve called. “Complain about how old you are later.”

“Right,” Tony nodded. “You should have all met Natasha Romanov by now, she’s our Operations Director, which means we all work for her when we’re on site. She asks you to jump, you ask her how high and should you be wearing a tutu because she is queen here.” 

He glanced over to the wall where Steve and Bucky were mock curtseying before Nat and she was rolling her eyes with a small smirk on her face. 

“Darcy Lewis is in charge of personnel, and that means not only things like days off and disclosures of relationships, but life stuff, too. If you’ve got shit going on and you need someone to talk to, Darcy is your girl. Next to her, the grumpy cat looking gentleman, is James Barnes, and he’s our head of maintenance, so if something breaks, he’ll pretend to fix it or call me so I can actually fix it.”

“Fuck off, Stark,” Bucky called good naturedly as Tony grinned. 

“And finally, that gorgeous creature next to Grumpy Cat is my fiancé, Steve Rogers, who is your head lifeguard. Some other folks you’ll see running around are Pepper Potts, my CEO at Stark Investments, Dr. May Parker, who is our on-site doctor but also works in the ER over at the hospital on 9, and her nephew Peter, who is the 11-year-old genius you will all get to know quickly because he has already somehow memorized your Gatorade preferences before he met you.” He flashed a smile to giggles in the crowd from the staff who already knew Peter. 

“Now, I’m going to turn this over to Nat to go over some basics, but let me say this,” Tony made sure to make eye contact with as many people as possible. “Have a really great summer. Work hard, hydrate, be kind to each other, take risks but don’t be stupid, and enjoy yourself. For some reason, magic happens on this island and we’re all fools if we ignore it. Now, Nat?”

As he and Nat traded spaces, Tony found his hand wrapped up in Steve’s. “Magic, huh?”

Tony leaned into Steve’s side and nodded. “Any other explanation as to how you deserve me?”

Steve snorted to cover his laughter and Darcy, who had overheard, punched Tony in the stomach. “Behave,” she hissed. 

“I have never,” Tony whispered back. His phone buzzed, showing a message from Pepper, so he indicated he’d meet them later and left the clubhouse. 

Later that evening, after the staff was oriented, and preparations were made for the soft open the following day, Steve and Tony found themselves on their front porch, having idle discussions about the season and some of the new staff Steve was worried about and a particularly tricky set of negotiations Tony and Pepper were going to be involved in soon in Japan. Steve was sketching, Tony was sipping, and both men were thinking about how this is what they wanted for the rest of their lives. 

“Hey baby,” Tony said at one point. 

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“I trust you,” Steve replied with a soft smile, falling into a rhythm they’d started a few months back. 

“I chose you,” Tony replied, reaching for Steve’s hand. 

“I love you,” Steve concluded, wrapping his fingers through his happily ever after and dreaming of forever as the seagulls called and the waves crashed. They stayed like that until Bucky yelled to them from his porch, calling them over for one last night of quiet before the chaos of summer descended. Soon, spilling out onto the front pebbles, Tony found himself surrounded by his family. Nat had done a Wawa run and gotten hoagies, Bucky had found drinks somewhere, Darcy set up the speakers, and Pepper had just gotten in from New York. 

“Hey, everyone,” Tony said a while later. “I’d like to propose a toast.”

They all reached for drinks and turned their attention to him. 

“When I think back to this time last summer, I’m a little shocked at how much life has changed. I mean, Buckaroo, we didn’t even know the depths to which one person could be grumpy while at the beach yet.” Bucky flipped his middle finger and they all laughed. “In all seriousness, I am so glad that Steve and Bucky are part of our little weirdness now and I’m excited to see where this season takes us and what other magic, yes, I said it, you all can stop teasing me now, it brings. To the magic of summer.”

“To summer!” came the cry.

To the magic of summer indeed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aight, folks, thanks so much for journeying on this one with me! If you liked this story, you'll most likely like my other stuff, so make sure to subscribe to my pseudo (or follow me on [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/betheflame1) or [Tumblr](http://betheflame.tumblr.com)) to keep up to date with my other works. Yes, I'm a multi-shipper, so if that stresses you out, I'm sorry!
> 
> The comments, the kudos, the bookmarks, the subscriptions... they're all so precious. Seriously.


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